Three gringos in Venezuela and Central America

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

IN MEMORY OF
MRS. VIRGINIA B. SPORER

FORDING THE CHAMELICON RIVER

THREE GRINGOS

IN VENEZUELA AND
CENTRAL AMERICA

BY

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK AND LONDON

HAR PER & BROTHERS

PUBLISHERS 1903

Copyright, i8</>, by HARPBR & BROTHERS.

Collega
Library

F

TO

MY FRIENDS
H. SOMERS SOMERSET

AND

LLOYD GRISCOM

CONTENTS

PAGE

ON THE CARIBBEAN SEA i

THE EXILED LOTTERY 27

IN HONDURAS 56

AT CORINTO 160

ON THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 193

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA . , 221

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

FORDING THE CHAMELICON RIVKR Frontispiece

MAP OF VENEZUELA AND CENTRAL AMERICA, SHOWING

THE ROUTE OF THE "THREE GRINGOS " .... xiii

GOVERNMENT HOUSE, BELIZE 7

SIR ALFRED MOLONEY IO

NATIVE CONSTABULARY, BELIZE 13

MAIN STREET, BELIZE 17

NATIVE WOMEN AT LIVINGSTON 2O

THE GUATEMALLECAN ARMY AT LIVINGSTON .... 23

BARRACKS AT PORT BARRIOS 2$

THE EXILED LOTTERY BUILDING 35

THE IGUANAS OF HONDURAS 5!

OUR NAVAL ATTACHE 57

OUR MILITARY ATTACHE 60

A STRETCH OF CENTRAL-AMERICAN RAILWAY .... 62

THE THREE GRINGOS 64

SETTING OUT FROM SAN PEDRO SULA 67

THE HIGHLANDS OF HONDURAS 7!

SOMERSET 74

A DRAWER OF WATER , 77

NATIVE METHOD OF DRYING COFFEE 85

IN A CENTRAL-AMERICAN FOREST 89

ON THE TRAIL TO SANTA BARBARA 97

A HALT AT TRINIDAD . IOI

X ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

GENERAL LOUIS BOGRAN IO5

OUR PACK-TRAIN AT SANTA BARBARA IO?

A VILLAGE IN THE INTERIOR 114

BRIDGE CONNECTING TEGUCIGALPA WITH ITS SUBURB . 123

BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF TEGUCIGALPA 127

THE BANK OF HONDURAS I2Q

STATUE OF MORAZAN 132

P. BONILLA 135

GENERAL LOUIS BOGKAN, EX-PRESIDENT 138

HARRACKS OF TEGUCIGALPA AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE

REVOLUTIONISTS 14!

MORAZAN, THE LIBERATOR OF HONDURAS 145

ON THE WAV TO CORINTO 155

PRINCIPAL HOTEL AND PRINCIPAL HOUSE AT CORINTO . l62

HARBOR OF CORINTO 175

THE PRESIDENT'S HOUSE AT MANAGUA 179

PRESIDENT ZEI.AYA OF NICARAGUA 183

MAP OF THE WORLD SHOWING CHANGE IN TRADE
ROUTES AFTER THE COMPLETION OF THE NICARA-
GUA CANAL IQI

DREDGES IN THE CANAL IQ5

THE BAY OF PANAMA igg

PANAMA CANAL ON THE PACIFIC SIDE 2O3

HUTS OF WORKMEN EMPLOYED ON THE CANAL . . . 2O(>

THE TOP OF A DREDGE 2CK)

STREET SCENE IN PANAMA 213

THE CANAL IN THE INTERIOR 217

STATUE OF SIMON BOLIVAR, CARACAS 223

STATUE OF WASHINGTON DECORATED WITH FLORAL

WREATHS BY THE VENEZUELANS 227

DECORATION OF THE STATUE OF BOLIVAR AT CARACAS,
VENEZUELA, DECEMBER l8, 1895, BY AMERICAN RESI-
DENTS 231

ILLUSTRATIONS XI

PAGE

SIMON BOLIVAR 234

VIEW OF LA GUAYRA 235

THE RAILROAD UP THE MOUNTAIN 23Q

COURT-YARD OF A HOUSE IN CARACAS 243

THE MARKET OF CARACAS 247

PRESIDENT CRESPO, OF VENEZUELA 2$I

LEGISLATIVE BUILDING, CARACAS 253

THE PRESIDENT'S BODY-GUARD OF COWBOYS .... 255
BAPTIZING INDIANS AT A VENEZUELAN STATION ON THE

CUYUNI RIVER 25y

A TYPICAL HUNTING-PARTY IN VENEZUELA 263

A CLEARING IN THE COUNTRY 267

THE CUYUNI RIVER 2?I

VIEW OF CARACAS Facing 274

VENEZUELAN STATION ON THE CUYUNI RIVER .... 274

ENGLISH STATION ON THE CUYUNI RIVER 275

DR. PEDRO EZEQUIEL ROJAS 277

MAP EXPLAINING VENEZUELAN BOUNDARY DISPUTE . . 2?8

THE CITY OF CARACAS 27Q

ON THE CARIBBEAN SEA

|HE steamer Brcakivatcr lay at the
end of a muddy fruit -wharf a mile
down the levee.

She was listed to sail that morning
for Central American ports, and we were going
with her in search of warm weather and other
unusual things. When we left New York the
streets were lined with frozen barricades of snow,
upon which the new brooms of a still newer ad-
ministration had made so little impression that
people were using them as an excuse for being
late for dinners ; and at Washington, while the
snow had disappeared, it was still bitterly cold.
And now even as far south as New Orleans we
were shivering in our great-coats, and the news-
papers were telling of a man who, the night be-
fore, had been found frozen to death in the
streets. It seemed as though we were to keep
on going south, forever seeking warmth, only to
find that Nature at every point of lower latitude

2 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

had paid us the compliment of changing her
season to spite us.

So the first question we asked when we came
over the side of the Breakwater was not when
we should first see land, but when we should
reach warm weather.

There were four of us, counting Charlwood,
young Somerset's servant. There was Henry
Somers Somerset, who has travelled greater dis-
tances for a boy still under age than any other
one of his much- travelled countrymen that I
have ever met. He has covered as many miles
in the last four years as would make five trips
around the world, and he came with me for the
fun of it, and in what proved the vain hope of
big game. The third was Lloyd Griscom, of
Philadelphia, and later of London, where he has
been attache at our embassy during the present
administration. He had been ordered south by
his doctor, and only joined us the day before we
sailed.

We sat shivering under the awning on the
upper deck, and watched the levees drop away
on either side as we pushed down the last ninety
miles of the Mississippi River. Church spires
and the roofs of houses showed from the low-
lying grounds behind the dikes, and gave us the
impression that we were riding on an elevated
road. The great river steamers, with paddle-
wheels astern and high double smoke-stacks, that

ON THE CARIBBEAN SEA 3

were associated in our minds with pictures of the
war and those in our school geographies, passed
us, pouring out heavy volumes of black smoke,
on their way to St. Louis, and on each bank we
recognized, also from pictures, magnolia -trees
and the ugly cotton - gins and the rows of ne-
groes' quarters like the men's barracks in a fort.
At six o'clock, when we had reached the Gulf,
the sun sank a blood-red disk into great desolate
bayous of long grass and dreary stretches of va-
cant water. Dead trees with hanging gray moss
and mistletoe on their bare branches reared them-
selves out of the swamps like gallows-trees or giant
sign -posts pointing the road to nowhere; and
the herons, perched by dozens on their limbs or
moving heavily across the sky with harsh, melan-
choly cries, were the only signs of life. On each
side of the muddy Mississippi the waste swamp-
land stretched as far as the eye could reach, and
every blade of the long grass and of the stunted
willows and every post of the dikes stood out
black against the red sky as vividly as though it
were lit by a great conflagration, and the stag-
nant pools and stretches of water showed one
moment like flashing lakes of fire, and the next,
as the light left them, turned into mirrors of ink.
It was a scene of the most awful and beautiful
desolation, and the silence, save for the steady
breathing of the steamer's engine, was the si-
lence of the Nile at night.

4 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

For the next three days we dropped due south
as the map lies from the delta of the Mississippi
through the Gulf of Mexico to the Caribbean
Sea. It was moonlight by night, and sun and
blue water by day, and the decks kept level, and
the vessel was clean.

Our fellow- passengers were banana -planters
and engineers going to Panama and Blucficlds,
and we asked them many questions concerning
rates of exchange and the rainy season and dis-
tances and means of transportation, to which
they gave answers as opposite as can only come
from people who have lived together in the same
place for the greater part of their lives.

Land, when it came, appeared in the shape of
little islands that floated in mid -air above the
horizon like the tops of trees, without trunks
to support them, or low -lying clouds. They
formed the skirmish-line of Yucatan, the north-
ern spur of Central America, and seemed from
our decks as innocent as the Jersey sand-hills,
but were, the pilot told us, inhabited by wild
Indians who massacre people who are so un-
fortunate as to be shipwrecked there, and who
will not pay taxes to Mexico. But the little we
saw of their savagery was when we passed within
a ship's length of a ruined temple to the Sun,
standing conspicuously on a jutting point of land,
with pillars as regular and heavily cut as some
of those on the Parthenon. It was interesting

ON THE CARIBBEAN SEA 5

to find such a monument a few days out from
New Orleans.

Islands of palms on one side and blue moun-
tains on the other, and water as green as cor-
roded copper, took the place of the white sand-
banks of Yucatan, and on the third day out we
had passed the Mexican state and steamed in
towards the coast of British Honduras, and its
chief seaport and capital, Belize.

British Honduras was formerly owned by
Spain, as was all of Central America, and was,
on account of its bays and islands, a picturesque
refuge for English and other pirates. In the
seventeenth century English logwood-cutters vis-
ited the place and obtained a footing, which has
been extended since by concessions and by con-
quest, so that the place is now a British depend-
ency. It forms a little slice of land between
Yucatan and Guatemala, one hundred and seven-
ty-four miles in its greatest length, and running
sixty-eight miles inland.

Belize is a pretty village of six thousand peo-
ple, living in low, broad-roofed bungalows, lying
white and cool-looking in the border of waving
cocoanut-trees and tall, graceful palms. It was
not necessary to tell us that Belize would be the
last civilized city we should see until we reached
the capital of Spanish Honduras. A British col-
ony is always civilized ; it is always the same, no
matter in what latitude it may be, and it is al-

6 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

ways distinctly British. Every one knows that
an Englishman takes his atmosphere with him
wherever he goes, but the truth of it never im-
pressed me so much as it did at Belize. There
were not more than two hundred English men
and women in the place, and yet, in the two
halves of two days that I was there I seemed to
see everything characteristic of an Englishman
in his native land. There were a few concessions
made to the country and to the huge native pop-
ulation, who are British subjects themselves; but
the colony, in spite of its surroundings, was just
as individually English as is the shilling that the
ship's steward pulls out of his pocket with a
handful of the queer coin that he has picked up
at the ports of a half-dozen Spanish republics.
They may be of all sizes and designs, and of
varying degrees of a value, or the lack of it,
which changes from day to day, but the English
shilling, with the queen's profile on one side and
its simple " one shilling " on the other, is worth
just as much at that moment and at that dis-
tance from home as it would be were you hand-
ing it to a hansom-cab driver in Piccadilly. And
we were not at all surprised to find that the
black native police wore the familiar blue-and-
white-striped cuff of the London bobby, and the
district-attorney a mortar-board cap and gown,
and the colonial bishop gaiters and an apron.
It was quite in keeping, also, that the advertise-

ON THE CARIBBEAN SEA 9

ments on the boardings should announce and
give equal prominence to a "Sunday-school
treat" and a boxing -match between men of
H.M.S. Pelican, and that the officers of that man-
of-war should be playing cricket with a local
eleven under the full tropical sun, and that the
chairs in the Council - room and Government
House should be of heavy leather stamped V.R.,
with a crown above the initials. An American
official in as hot a climate, being more adaptable,
would have had bamboo chairs with large, open-
wrork backs, or would have even supplied the
council with rocking-chairs.

Lightfoot agreed to take us ashore at a quarter
of a dollar apiece. He had a large open sail-boat,
and everybody called him Lightfoot and seemed
to know him intimately, so we called him Light-
foot too. He was very black, and light-hearted
at least, and spoke English with the soft, hesitat-
ing gentleness that marks the speech of all these
natives. It was Sunday on land, and Sunday in
an English colony is observed exactly as it should
be, and so the natives were in heavily starched
white clothes, and were all apparently going some-
where to church in rigid rows of five or six. But
there were some black soldiers of the West India
Regiment in smart Zouave uniforms and turbans
that furnished us with local color, and we pursued
one of them for some time admiringly, until he be-
come nervous and beat a retreat to the barracks.

10 THKKK C.RINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

Somerset had a letter from his ambassador in
Washington to Sir Alfred Moloney, K.C.M.G.,
the governor of British Honduras, and as we
hoped it would get us all an invitation to dinner,

SIR Al.FKKI) .MOLONEY
(Central Figure)

we urged him to present it at once. Four days
of the ship's steward's bountiful dinners, served
at four o'clock in the afternoon, had made us
anxious for a change both in the hour and the

ON THE CARIBBEAN SEA . II

diet. The governor's house at Belize is a very
large building, fronting the bay, with one of the
finest views from and most refreshing breezes on
its veranda that a man could hope to find on a
warm day, and there is a proud and haughty
sentry at each corner of the grounds and at the
main entrance. A fine view of blue waters be-
yond a green turf terrace covered with cannon
and lawn-tennis courts, and four sentries march-
ing up and down in the hot sun, ought to make
any man, so it seems to me, content to sit on his
porch in the shade and feel glad that he is a
governor.

Somerset passed the first sentry with safety,
and we sat down on the grass by the side of the
road opposite to await developments, and were
distressed to observe him make directly for the
kitchen, with the ambassador's letter held firmly
in his hand. So we stood up and shouted to him
to go the other way, and he became embarrassed,
and continued to march up and down the gravel
walk with much indecision, and as if he could
not make up his mind where he wanted to go,
like the grenadiers in front of St. James's Palace.
It happened that his excellency was out, so
Somerset left our cards and his letter, and we
walked off through the green, well-kept streets
and wondered at the parrots and the chained
monkeys and the Anglicized little negro girls in
white cotton stockings and with Sunday-school

12 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

books under their arms. All the show-places of
interest were closed on that day, so, after an in-
effectual attempt to force our way into the jail,
which we mistook for a monastery, we walked
back through an avenue of cocoanut-palms to the
International Hotel for dinner.

We had agreed that as it was our first dinner
on shore, it should be a long and excellent one,
with several kinds of wine. The International
Hotel is a large one, with four stories, and a
balcony on each floor; and after wandering over
the first three of these in the dark we came upon
a lonely woman with three crying children, who
told us with reproving firmness that in Belize the
dinner-hour is at four in the afternoon, and that
no one should expect a dinner at seven. We
were naturally cast down at this rebuff, and even
more so when her husband appeared out of the
night and informed us that keeping a hotel did
not pay — at least, that it did not pay him — and
that he could not give us anything to drink be-
cause he had not renewed his license, and even if
he had a license he would not sell us anything
on Sunday. He had a touch of malaria, he said,
and took a gloomy view of life in consequence,
and our anxiety to dine well seemed, in contrast,
unfeeling and impertinent. But we praised the
beauty of the three children, and did not set him
right when he mistook us for officers from the
English gunboats in the harbor, and for one of

ON THE CARIBBEAN SEA 15

these reasons he finally gave us a cold dinner by
the light of a smoking lamp, and made us a pres-
ent of a bottle of stout, for which he later re-
fused any money. We would have enjoyed our
dinner at Belize in spite of our disappointment
had not an orderly arrived in hot search after
Somerset, and borne him away to dine at Gov-
ernment House, where Griscom and I pictured
him, as we continued eating our cold chicken
and beans, dining at her majesty's expense, with
fine linen and champagne, and probably ice.
Lightfoot took us back to the boat in mournful
silence, and we spent the rest of the evening on
the quarter-deck telling each other of the most
important people with whom we had ever dined,
and had nearly succeeded in re-establishing our
self-esteem, when Somerset dashed up in a man-
of-war's launch glittering with brass and union-
jacks, and left it with much ringing of electric
bells and saluting and genial farewells from ad-
mirals and midshipmen in gold-lace, with whom
he seemed to be on a most familiar and friendly
footing. This was the final straw, and we held
him struggling over the ship's side, and threatened
to drop him to the sharks unless he promised
never to so desert us again. And discipline was
only restored when he assured us that he was the
bearer of an invitation from the governor to both
breakfast and luncheon the following morning.
The governor apologized the next day for the in-

1 6 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

formality of the manner in which he had sent us
the invitation, so I thought it best not to tell
him that it had been delivered by a young man
while dangling by his ankles from the side of the
ship, with one hand holding his helmet and the
other clutching at the rail of the gangway.

There is much to be said of Belize, for in its
way it was one of the prettiest ports at which
we touched, and its cleanliness and order, while
they were not picturesque or foreign to us then,
were in so great contrast to the ports we visited
later as to make them most remarkable. It was
interesting to see the responsibilities and the
labor of government apportioned out so carefully
and discreetly, and to find commissioners of
roads, and then district commissioners, and under
them inspectors, and to hear of boards of edu-
cation and boards of justice, each doing its ap-
pointed work in this miniature government, and
all responsible to the representative of the big
government across the sea. And it was reassur-
ing to read in the blue-books of the colony that
the health of the port has improved enormously
during the last three years.

Monday showed an almost entirely different
Belize from the one we had seen on the day
before. Shops were open and busy, and the
markets were piled high with yellow oranges and
bananas and strange fruits, presided over by
negresscs in rich-colored robes and turbans, and

MAIN STREET, BELIZE

ON THE CARIBBEAN SEA 19

smoking fat cigars. There was a show of justice
also in a parade of prisoners, who, in spite of
their handcuffs, were very anxious to halt long
enough to be photographed, and there was a
great bustle along the wharves, where huge rafts
of logwood and mahogany floated far into the
water. The governor showed us through his
botanical station, in which he has collected food-
giving products from over all the world, and
plants that absorb the malaria in the air, and he
hinted at the social life of Belize as well, tempt-
ing us with a ball and dinners to the officers of
the men-of-war ; but the Breakwater would not
wait for such frivolities, so we said farewell to
Belize and her kindly governor, and thereafter
walked under strange flags, and were met at
every step with the despotic little rules and
safeguards which mark unstable governments.

Livingston was like a village on the coast of
East Africa in comparison with Belize. It is
the chief seaport of Guatemala on the Atlantic
side, and Guatemala is the furthest advanced of
all the Central American republics ; but her
civilization lies on the Pacific side, and does not
extend so far as her eastern boundary.

There are two opposite features of landscape
in the tropics which are always found together —
the royal palm, which is one of the most beauti-
ful of things, and the corrugated zinc-roof cus-
tom-house, which is one of the ugliest. Nature

20

THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

NATIVK WOMF.N AT LIVINGSTON

never appears so extravagant or so luxurious as
she does in these hot latitudes; but just as soon
as she has fashioned a harbor after her own
liking, and set it off at her best so that it is a
haven of delight to those who approach it from
the sea, civilized man comes along and hammers
square walls of zinc together and spoils the
beauty of the place forever. The natives, who

ON THE CARIBBEAN SEA 21

do not care for customs dues, help nature out
with thatch - roofed huts and walls of adobe or
yellow cane, or add curved red tiles to the more
pretentious houses, and so fill out the picture.
But the "gringo," or the man from the interior,
is in a hurry, and wants something that will with-
stand earthquakes and cyclones, and so wher-
ever you go you can tell that he has been there
before you by his architecture of zinc.

When you turn your back on the custom-
house at Livingston and the rows of wooden
shops with open fronts, you mount the hill upon
which the town stands, and there you will find
no houses but those which have been created out
of the mud and the trees of the place itself.
There are no streets to the village nor doors to
the houses ; they are all exactly alike, and the
bare mud floor of one is as unindividual, except
for the number of naked children crawling upon
it, as is any of the others. The sun and the rain
are apparently free to come and go as they like,
and every one seems to live in the back of the
house, under the thatched roof which shades the
clay ovens. Most of the natives were coal-black,
and the women, in spite of the earth floors below
and the earth walls round about them, were
clean, and wore white gowns that trailed from
far down their arms, leaving the chest and shoul-
ders bare. They were a very simple, friendly
lot of people, and ran from all parts of the settle-

22 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

ment to be photographed, and brought us flowers
from their gardens, for which they refused money.

We had our "first view of the Central American
soldier at Livingston, and, in spite of all we had
heard, he surprised us very much. The oldest
of those whom we saw was eighteen years, and
the youngest soldiers were about nine. They
wore blue jean uniforms, ornamented with white
tape, and the uniforms differed in shade accord-
ing to the number of times they had been
washed. These young men carried their mus-
kets half-way up the barrel, or by the bayonet,
dragging the stock on the ground.

General Barrios, the young President of Guate-
mala, has some very smart soldiers at the capital,
and dresses them in German uniforms, which is
a compliment he pays to the young German
emperor, for whom he has a great admiration ;
but his discipline does not extend so far as the
Caribbean Sea.

The river Dulce goes in from Livingston, and
we were told it was one of the things in Central
America we ought to see, as its palisades were
more beautiful than those of the Rhine. The
man who told us this said he spoke from hear-
say, and that he had never been *on the Rhine,
but that he knew a gentleman who had. You
can well believe that it is very beautiful from
what you can see of its mouth, where it flows
into the Caribbean between great dark banks as

ON THE CARIBBEAN SEA

25

high as the palisades opposite Dobbs Ferry, and
covered with thick, impenetrable green.

Port Barrios, to which one comes in a few
hours, is at one end of a railroad, and surround-
ed by all the desecration that such an improve-
ment on nature implies, in the form of zinc
depots, piles of railroad-ties, and rusty locomo-
tives. The town consists of a single row of
native huts along the coast, terminating in a hos-
pital. Every house is papered throughout with
copies of the New York Police Gazette, which
must give the Guatemallecan a lurid light on
the habits and virtues of his cousins in North

I5ARRACKS AT PORT BARRIOS

26 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

America. Most of our passengers left the ship
here, and we met them, while she was taking on
bananas, wandering about the place with blank
faces, or smiling grimly at the fate which con-
demned them and their blue-prints and transits
to a place where all nature was beautiful and
only civilized man was discontented.

We lay at Barrios until late at night, wander-
ing round the deserted decks, or watching the
sharks sliding through the phosphorus and the
lights burning in the huts along the shore.
At midnight we weighed anchor, and in the
morning steamed into Puerto Cortez, the chief
port of Spanish Honduras, where the first part
of our journey ended, and where we exchanged
the ship's deck for the Mexican saddle, and
hardtack for tortillas.

THE EXILED LOTTERY

years ago, while I was passing
through Texas, I asked a young man
in the smoking-car if he happened to
know where I could find the United
States troops, who were at that time riding some-
where along the borders of Texas and Mexico,
and engaged in suppressing the so-called Garza
revolution.

The young man did not show that he was
either amused or surprised at the abruptness of
the question, but answered me promptly, as a
matter of course, and with minute detail. " You
want to go to San Antonio," he said, " and take
the train to Laredo, on the Mexican boundary,
and then change to the freight that leaves once
a day to Corpus Christi, and get off at Pena sta-
tion. Pena is only a water-tank, but you can
hire a horse there and ride to the San Rosario
Ranch. Captain Hardie is at Rosario with Troop
G, Third Cavalry. They call him the Riding

28 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

Captain, and if any one can show you all there
is to see in this Garza outfit, he can."

The locomotive whistle sounded at that mo-
ment, the train bumped itself into a full stop at
a station, and the young man rose. " Good-
day," he said, smiling pleasantly; "I get off
here."

He was such an authoritative young man, and
he had spoken in so explicit a manner, that I did
as he had directed ; and if the story that fol-
lowed was not interesting, the fault was mine,
and not that of my chance adviser.

A few months ago I was dining alone in Del-
monico's, when the same young man passed out
through the room, and stopped on his way be-
side my table.

" Do you remember me ?" he said. " I met
you once in a smoking-car in Texas. Well,
I've got a story now that's better than any you'll
find lying around here in New York. You want
to go to a little bay called Puerto Cortez, on the
eastern coast of Honduras, in Central America,
and look over the exiled Louisiana State Lottery
there. It used to be the biggest gambling con-
cern in the world, but now it's been banished to
a single house on a mud-bank covered with palm-
trees, and from there it reaches out all over the
United States, and sucks in thousands and thou-
sands of victims like a great octopus. You want

THE EXILED LOTTERY 29

to go there and write a story about it. Good-
night," he added ; then he nodded again, with a
smile, and walked across the room and disap-
peared into Broadway.

When a man that you have met once in a
smoking-car interrupts you between courses to
suggest that you are wasting your time in New
York, and that you ought to go to a coral reef in
Central America and write a story of an outlawed
lottery, it naturally interests you, even if it does
not spoil your dinner. It interested me, at least,
so much that I went back to my rooms at once,
and tried to find Puerto Cortez on the map ; and
later, when the cold weather set in, and the grass-
plots in Madison Square turned into piled-up
islands of snow, surrounded by seas of slippery
asphalt, I remembered the palm-trees, and went
South to investigate the exiled lottery. That is
how this chapter and this book came to be
written.

Every one who goes to any theatre in the
United States may have read among the adver-
tisements on the programme an oddly worded
one which begins, " Conrad ! Conrad ! Conrad !"
and which goes on to say that —

"In accepting the Presidency of the Honduras Na-
tional Lottery Company (Louisiana State Lottery Com-
pany) I shall not surrender the Presidency of the Gulf
Coast Ice and Manufacturing Company, of Bay St. Louis,
Miss.

30 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

"Therefore address all proposals for supplies, ma-
chinery, etc., as well as all business communications, to
" PAUL CONRAD, Puerto Cortez, Honduras,
" Care Central America Express,

" FORT TAMPA CITY,

" FLORIDA, U. S. A."

You have probably read this advertisement
often, and enjoyed the na'ive manner in which Mr.
Conrad asks for correspondence on different sub-
jects, especially on that relating to " all business
communications," and how at the same time he
has so described his whereabouts that no letters
so addressed would ever reach his far-away home
in Puerto Cortez, but would be promptly stopped
at Tampa, as he means that they should.

After my anonymous friend had told me of
Puerto Cortez, I read of it on the programme
with a keener interest, and Puerto Cortez became
to me a harbor of much mysterious moment, of
a certain dark significance, and of possible ad-
venture. I remembered all that the lottery had
been before the days of its banishment, and all
that it had dared to be when, as a corporation
legally chartered by the State of Louisiana, it
had put its chain and collar upon legislatures
and senators, judges and editors, when it had
silenced the voice of the church and the pulpit
by great gifts of money to charities and hospi-
tals, so giving out in a lump sum with one hand
what it had taken from the people in dollars and

THE EXILED LOTTERY 31

half-dollars, five hundred and six hundred fold,
with the other. I remembered when its trade-
mark, in open-faced type, " La. S. L.," was as
familiar in every newspaper in the United States
as were the names of the papers themselves,
when it had not been excommunicated by the
postmaster-general, and it had not to hide its real
purpose under a carefully worded paragraph in
theatrical programmes or on "dodgers" or hand-
bills that had an existence of a moment before
they were swept out into the street, and which,
as they were not sent through mails, were not
worthy the notice of the federal government.

It was not so very long ago that it requires any
effort to remember it. It is only a few years
since the lottery held its drawings freely and
with much pomp and circumstance in the Charles
Theatre, and Generals Beauregard and Early pre-
sided at these ceremonies, selling the names they
had made glorious in a lost cause to help a cause
which was, for the lottery people at least, dis-
tinctly a winning one. For in those days the
state lottery cleared above all expenses seven
million dollars a year, and Generals Beauregard
and Early drew incomes from it much larger
than the government paid to the judges of the
Supreme Court and the members of the cabinet
who finally declared against the company and
drove it into exile.

There had been many efforts made to kill it

32 THREE ORINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

in the past, and the state lottery was called
"the national disgrace " and " the modern slav-
ery,' and Louisiana was spoken of as a blot on
the map of our country, as was Utah when
polygamy flourished within her boundaries and
defied the laws of the federal government. The
final rally against the lottery occurred in 1890,
when the lease of the company expired, and
the directors applied to the legislature for a
renewal. At that time it was paying out but
very little and taking in fabulous sums; how
much it really made will probably never be told,
but its gains were probably no more exaggerated
by its enemies than was the amount of its ex-
penses by the company itself. Its outlay for ad-
vertising, for instance, which must have been one
of its chief expenses, was only forty thousand
dollars a year, which is a little more than a firm
of. soap manufacturers pay for their advertising
for the same length of time ; and it is rather dis-
couraging to remember that for a share of this
bribe every newspaper in the city of New Orleans
and in the State of Louisiana, with a few notable
exceptions, became an organ of the lottery, and
said nothing concerning it but what was good.
To this sum may be added the salaries of its
officers, the money paid out in prizes, the cost
of printing and mailing the tickets, and the sum
of forty thousand dollars paid annually to the
State of Louisiana. This tribute was considered

THE EXILED LOTTERY 33

as quite sufficient when the lottery was first start-
ed, and while it struggled for ten years to make a
living; but in 1890, when its continued existence
was threatened, the company found it could very
well afford to offer the state not forty thousand,
but a million dollars a year, which gives a faint
idea of what its net earnings must have been. As
a matter of fact, in those palmy times when there
were daily drawings, the lottery received on some
days as many as eighteen to twenty thousand
letters, with orders for tickets enclosed which
averaged five dollars a letter.

It was Postmaster -general Wanamaker who
put a stop to all this by refusing to allow any
printed matter concerning the lottery to pass
outside of the State of Louisiana, which decis-
ion, when it came, proved to be the order of ex-
ile to the greatest gambling concern of modern
times.

The lottery, of course, fought this decision in
the courts, and the case was appealed to the Su-
preme Court of the United States, and was up-
held, and from that time no letter addressed to
the lottery in this country, or known to contain
matter referring to the lottery, and no news-
paper advertising it, can pass through the mails.
This ruling was known before the vote on the
renewal of the lease came up in the Legislature
of Louisiana, and the lottery people say that,
knowing that they could not, under these new

34 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

restrictions, afford to pay the sum of one million
dollars a year, they ceased their efforts to pass
the bill granting a renewal of their lease, and let
it go without a fight. This may or may not be
true, but in any event the bill did not pass, and
the greatest lottery of all times was without a
place in which to spin its wheel, without a charter
or a home, and was cut off from the most obvi-
ous means of communication with its hundreds
of thousands of supporters. But though it was
excommunicated, outlawed, and exiled, it was
not beaten ; it still retained agents all over the
country, and it still held its customers, who were
only waiting to throw their money into its lap,
and still hoping that the next drawing would
bring the grand prize.

For some long time the lottery was driven
about from pillar to post, and knocked eagerly
here and there for admittance, seeking a home
and resting-place. It was not at first successful.
The first rebuff came from Mexico, where it had
proposed to move its plant, but the Mexican
government was greedy, and wanted too large a
sum for itself, or, what is more likely, did not
want so well-organized a rival to threaten the
earnings of its own national lottery. Then the
republics of Colombia and Nicaragua were each
tempted with the honor of giving a name to the
new company, but each declined that distinction,
and so it finally came begging to Honduras, the

THE EXILED LOTTERY

35

least advanced of all of the Central American
republics, and the most heavily burdened with
debt.

Honduras agreed to receive the exile, and to
give it her name and protection for the sum of

THE EXILED LOTTERY BUILDING

twenty thousand dollars a year and twenty per
cent, of its gross earnings. It would seem that
this to a country that has not paid the interest

36 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

on her national debt for twelve years was a very
advantageous bargain ; but as four presidents
and as many revolutions and governments have
appeared and disappeared in the two years in
which the lottery people have received their
charter in Honduras, the benefit of the arrange-
ment to them has not been an obvious one,
and it was not until two years ago that the first
drawing of the lottery was held at Puerto Cortez.
The company celebrated this occasion with a
pitiful imitation of its former pomp and cere-
mony, and there was much feasting and speech-
making, and a special train was run from the in-
terior to bring important natives to the ceremo-
nies. But the train fell off the track four times,
and was just a day late in consequence. The
young man who had charge of the train told me
this, and he also added that he did not believe
in lotteries.

During these two years, when representatives
of the company were taking rides of nine days
each to the capital to overcome the objections of
the new presidents who had sprung into office
while these same representatives had been mak-
ing their return trip to the coast, others were
seeking a foothold for the company in the United
States. The need of this was obvious and im-
perative. The necessity which had been forced
upon them of holding the drawings out of this
country, and of giving up the old name and

THE EXILED LOTTERY 37

trade-mark, was serious enough, though it had
been partially overcome. It did not matter
where they spun their wheel ; but if the com-
pany expected to live, there must be some place
where it could receive its mail and distribute its
tickets other than the hot little Honduranian
port, locked against all comers by quarantine for
six months of the year, and only to be reached
during the other six by a mail that arrives once
every eight days.

The lottery could not entirely overcome this
difficulty, of course, but through the aid of the
express companies of this country it was able to
effect a substitute, and through this cumbersome
and expensive method of transportation its man-
agers endeavored to carry on the business which
in the days when the post-office helped them
had brought them in twenty thousand letters in
twenty-four hours. They selected for their base
of operations in the United States the port of
Tampa, in the State of Florida — that refuge of
prize-fighters and home of unhappy Englishmen
who have invested in the swamp-lands there, un-
der the delusion that they were buying town sites
and orange plantations, and which masquerades
as a winter resort with a thermometer that not
infrequently falls below freezing. So Tampa be-
came their home ; and though the legislature of
that state proved incorruptible, so the lottery
people themselves tell me, there was at least an

38 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMER.ICA

understanding, between them and those in au-
thority that the express company was not to be
disturbed, and that no other lottery was to have
a footing in Florida for many years to come.

If Puerto Cortez proved interesting when it
was only a name on a theatre programme, you
may understand to what importance it grew
when it could not be found on the map of any
steamship company in New York, and when no
paper of that city advertised dates of sailing to
that port. For the first time Low's Exchange
failed me and asked for time, and the ubiquitous
Cook & Sons threw up their hands, and offered
in desperation and as a substitute a comfortable
trip to upper Kurmah or to Mozambique, pro-
testing that Central America was beyond even
their finding out. Even the Maritime Exchange
confessed to a much more intimate knowledge
of the west coast of China than of the little
group of republics which lies only a three or
four days' journey from the city of New Orleans.
So I was forced to haunt the shipping-offices of
Howling Green for days together, and convinced
myself while so engaged that that is the only
way properly to pursue the study of geography,
and I advise every one to try it, and submit the
idea respectfully to instructors of youth. For
you will find that by the time you have in-
terviewed fifty shipping-clerks, and learned from
them where they can set you down and pick you

THE EXILED LOTTERY 39

up and exchange you to a fruit-vessel or coast-
ing steamer, you will have obtained an idea of
foreign ports and distances which can never be
gathered from flat maps or little revolving globes.
I finally discovered that there was a line running
from New York and another from New Orleans,
the fastest steamer of which latter line, as I
learned afterwards, was subsidized by the lottery
people. They use it every month to take their
representatives and clerks to Puerto Cortez, when,
after they have held the monthly drawing, they
steam back again to New Orleans or Tampa,
carrying with them the list of winning numbers
and the prizes.

It was in the boat of this latter line that we
finally awoke one morning to find her anchored
in the harbor of Puerto Cortez.

The harbor is a very large one and a very safe
one. It is encircled by mountains on the sea-
side, and by almost impenetrable swamps and
jungles on the other. Close around the waters
of the bay are bunches and rows of the cocoanut
palm, and a village of mud huts covered with
thatch. There is also a tin custom-house, which
includes the railroad-office and a comandancia,
and this and the jail or barracks of rotting white-
washed boards, and the half-dozen houses of one
story belonging to consuls and shipping agents,
are the only other frame buildings in the place
save one. That is a large mansion with broad

40 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

verandas, painted in colors, and set in a carefully
designed garden of rare plants and manaca palms.
Two poles are planted in the garden, one flying
the blue-and-white flag of Honduras, the other
with the stripes and stars of the United States.
This is the home of the exiled lottery. It is the
most pretentious building and the cleanest in
the whole republic of Honduras, from the Carib-
bean Sea to the Pacific slope.

I confess that I was foolish enough to regard
this house of magnificent exterior, as I viewed it
from the wharf, as seriously as a general observes
the ramparts and defences of the enemy before
making his advance. I had taken a nine days'
journey with the single purpose of seeing and
getting at the truth concerning this particular
building, and whether I was now to be viewed
with suspicion and treated as an intruder, whether
my object would be guessed at once and I should
be forced to wait on the beach for the next
steamer, or whether I would be received with
kindness which came from ignorance of my
intentions, I could not tell. And while I con-
sidered, a black Jamaica negro decided my move-
ments for me. There was a hotel, he answered,
doubtfully, but he thought it would be better,
if Mr. Barross would let me in, to try for a room
in the Lottery Building.

" Mr. Barross sometimes takes boarders," he
said, "and the Lottery Building is a fine house,

THE EXILED LOTTERY 41

sir — finest house this side Mexico city." He
added, encouragingly, that he spoke English
" very good," and that he had been in London.

Sitting on the wide porch of the Lottery Build-
ing was a dark-faced, distinguished-looking little
man, a Creole apparently, with white hair and
white goatee. He rose and bowed as I came up
through the garden and inquired of him if he
was the manager of the lottery, Mr. Barross, and
if he could give me food and shelter. The gen-
tleman answered that he was Mr. Barross, and
that he could and would do as I asked, and
appealed with hospitable warmth to a tall, hand-
some woman, with beautiful white hair, to sup-
port him in his invitation. Mrs. Barross assent-
ed kindly, and directed her servants to place a
rocking-chair in the shade, and requested me to
be seated in it ; luncheon, she assured'me, would
be ready in a half-hour, and she hoped that the
voyage south had been a pleasant one.

And so within five minutes after arriving in
the mysterious harbor of Puerto Cortez I found
myself at home under the roof of the outlawed
lottery, and being particularly well treated by
its representative, and feeling particularly un-
comfortable in consequence. I was heartily
sorry that I had not gone to the hotel. And so,
after I had been in my room, I took pains to
ascertain exactly what my position in the house
might be, and whether or not, apart from the

42 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

courtesy of Mr. Barross and his wife, for which
no one could make return, I was on the same
free footing that I would have been in a hotel.
I was assured that I was regarded as a transient
boarder, and that I was a patron rather than a
guest ; but as I did not yet feel at ease, I took
courage, and explained to Mr. Barross that I
was not a coffee-planter or a capitalist looking
for a concession from the government, but that I
was in Honduras to write of what I found there.
Mr. Barross answered that he knew already why
I was there from the New Orleans papers which
had arrived in the boat with me, and seemed
rather pleased than otherwise to have me about
the house. This set my mind at rest, and though
it may not possibly be of the least interest to
the reader, it is of great importance to me that
the same reader should understand that all which
I write here of the lottery was told to me by
the lottery people themselves, with the full
knowledge that I was going to publish it. And
later, when I had the pleasure of meeting Mr.
Duprez, the late editor of the States, in New
( Means, and then in Tegucigalpa, as representa-
tive of the lottery, I warned him in the presence
of several of our friends to be careful, as I would
probably make use of all he told me. To which
he agreed, and continued answering questions
for the rest of the evening. I may also add that
I have taken care to verify the figures used here,

THE EXILED LOTTERY 43

for the reason that the lottery people are at such
an obvious disadvantage in not being allowed
by law to reply to what is said of them, nor to
correct any mistake in any statements that may
be made to their disadvantage.

I had never visited a hotel or a country-house
as curious as the one presided over by Mr. Bar-
ross. It was entirely original in its decoration,
unique in its sources of entertainment, and its
business office, unlike most business offices, pos-
sessed a peculiar fascination. The stationery for
the use of the patrons, arid on which I wrote to
innocent friends in the North, bore the letter-
head of the Honduras Lottery Company ; the
pictures on the walls were framed groups of lot-
tery tickets purchased in the past by Mr. Bar-
ross, which had not drawn prizes ; and the safe
in which the guest might place his valuables con-
tained a large canvas-bag sealed with red wax,
and holding in prizes for the next drawing sev-
enty-five thousand dollars.

Wherever you turned were evidences of the
peculiar business that was being carried on un-
der the roof that sheltered you, and outside in
the garden stood another building, containing
the printing-presses on which the lists of win-
ning numbers were struck off before they were
distributed broadcast about the world. But of
more interest than all else was the long, sunshiny,
empty room running the full length of the house,

44 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

in which, on a platform at one end, were two
immense wheels, one of glass and brass, and as
transparent as a bowl of goldfish, and the other
closely draped in a heavy canvas hood laced and
strapped around it, and holding sealed and locked
within its great bowels one hundred thousand
paper tickets in one hundred thousand rubber
tubes. In this atmosphere and with these sur-
roundings my host and hostess lived their life of
quiet conventional comfort — a life full of the
lesser interests of every day, and lighted for others
by their most gracious and kindly courtesy and
hospitable good-will. When I sat at their table
I was always conscious of the great wheels, show-
ing through the open door from the room be-
yond like skeletons in a closet ; but it was not
so with my host, whose chief concern might be
that our glasses should be filled, nor with my
hostess, who presided at the head of the table —
which means more than sitting there — with that
dignity and charm which is peculiar to a South-
ern woman, and which made dining with her an
affair of state, and not one of appetite.

I had come to see the working of a great gam-
bling scheme, and I had anticipated that there
might be some difficulty put in the way of my
doing so; but if the lottery plant had been a
cider-press in an orchard I could not have been
more welcome to examine and to study it and
to take it to pieces. It was not so much that

THE EXILED LOTTERY 45

they had nothing to conceal, or that now, while
they are fighting for existence, they would rather
risk being abused than not being mentioned at
all. For they can fight abuse ; they have had
to do that for a long time. It is silence and ob-
livion that they fear now ; the silence that means
they are forgotten, that their arrogant glory has
departed, that they are only a memory. They
can fight those who fight them, but they cannot
fight with people who, if they think of them at
all, think of them as already dead and buried.
It was neither of these reasons that gave me free
admittance to the workings of the lottery ; it
was simply that to Mr. and Mrs. Barross the
lottery was a religion ; it was the greatest chari-
table organization of the age, and the purest
philanthropist of modern times could not have
more thoroughly believed in his good works than
did Mrs. Barross believe that noble and gener-
ous benefits were being bestowed on mankind at
every turn of the great wheel in her back parlor.
This showed itself in the admiration which
she shares with her husband for the gentlemen
of the company, and their coming once a month
is an event of great moment to Mrs. Barross,
who must find it dull sometimes, in spite of the
great cool house, with its many rooms and broad
porches, and gorgeous silk hangings over the
beds, and the clean linen, and airy, sunlit dining-
room. She is much more interested in telling

46 THRKE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

the news that the gentlemen brought down with
them when they last came than in the result of
the drawing, and she recalls the compliments
they paid her garden, but she cannot remember
the number that drew the capital prize. It was
interesting to find this big gambling scheme in
the hands of two such simple, kindly people, and
to see how commonplace it was to them, how
much a matter of routine and of habit. They
sang its praises if you wished to talk of it, but
they were more deeply interested in the lesser
affairs of their own household. And at one time
we ceased discussing it to help try on the baby's
new boots that had just arrived on the steamer,
and patted them on the place where the heel
should have been to drive them on the extremi-
ties of two waving fat legs. We all admired the
tassels which hung from them, and which the
baby tried to pull off and put in his mouth.
They were bronze boots with black buttons, and
the first the baby had ever worn, and the event
filled the home of the exiled lottery with intense
excitement.

In the cool of the afternoon Mr. Barross sat
on the broad porch rocking himself in a big bent-
wood chair and talked of the civil war, in which
he had taken an active part, with that enthusiasm
and detail with which only a Southerner speaks
of it, not knowing that to this generation in the
North it is history, and something of which one

THE EXILED LOTTERY 47

reads in books, and is not a topic of conversa-
tion of as fresh interest as the fall of Tammany or
the Venezuela boundary dispute. And as we lis-
tened we watched Mrs. Barross moving about
among her flowers with a sunshade above her
white hair and holding her train in her hand,
stopping to cut away a dead branch or to pluck
a rose or to turn a bud away from the leaves so
that it might feel the sun.

And inside, young Barross was going over the
letters which had arrived with the morning's
steamer, emptying out the money that came with
them on the table, filing them away, and noting
them as carefully and as methodically as a bank
clerk, and sealing up in return the little green
and yellow tickets that were to go out all over
the world, and which had been paid for by clerks
on small salaries, laboring-men of large families,
idle good-for-nothings, visionaries, born gamblers
and ne'er-do-wells, and that multitude of others
of this world who want something for nothing,
and who trust that a turn of luck will accomplish
for them what they are too listless and faint-
hearted and lazy ever to accomplish for them-
selves. It would be an excellent thing for each
of these gamblers if he could look in at the great
wheel at Puerto Cortez, and see just what one
hundred thousand tickets look like, and what
chance his one atom of a ticket has of forcing
its way to the top of that great mass at the ex-

48 THKEK ORINOOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

act moment that the capital prize rises to the
surface in the other wheel. lie could have seen
it in the old days at the Charles Theatre, and he
is as free as is any one to see it to-day at Puerto
Cortez ; but I should think it would be unfortu-
nate for the lottery if any of its customers be-
came too thorough a student of the doctrine of
chances.

The room in which the drawings are held is
about forty feet long, well lighted by many long,
wide windows, and with the stage upon which
the wheels stand blocking one end. It is unfur-
nished, except for the chairs and benches, upon
which the natives or any chance or intentional
visitors are welcome to sit and to watch the
drawing. The larger wheel, which holds, when
all the tickets are sold, the hopes of one hundred
thousand people, is about six feet in diameter,
with sides of heavy glass, bound together by a
wooden tire two feet wide. This tire or rim is
made of staves, formed like those of a hogshead,
and in it is a door a foot square. After the
tickets have been placed in their little rubber
jackets and shovelled into the wheel, this door is
locked with a padlock, and strips of paper are
pasted across it and sealed at each end, and so
it remains until the next drawing. One hundred
thousand tickets in rubber tubes an inch long
and a quarter of an inch wide take up a great
deal of space, and make such an appreciable

THE EXILED LOTTERY 49

difference in the weight of the wheel that it re-
quires the efforts of two men pulling on the
handles at either side to even budge it. Another
man and myself were quite satisfied when we
had put our shoulders to it and had succeeded
in turning it a foot or two. But it was interest-
ing to watch the little black tubes with even
that slow start go slipping and sliding down over
the others, leaving the greater mass undisturbed
and packed together at the bottom as a wave
sweeps back the upper layer of pebbles on a
beach. This wheel was manufactured by Jack-
son & Sharp, of Wilmington, Delaware. The
other wheel is much smaller, and holds the prizes.
It was made by John Robinson, of Baltimore.

Whenever there is a drawing, General W. L.
Cabell, of Texas, and Colonel C. J. Villere, of
Louisiana, who have taken the places of the late
General Beau regard and of the late General
Early, take their stand at different wheels, Gen-
eral Cabell at the large and Colonel Villere at
the one holding the prizes. They open the
doors which they had sealed up a month previ-
ous, and into each wheel a little Indian girl puts
her hand and draws out a tube. The tube hold-
ing the ticket is handed to General Cabell, and
the one holding the prize won is given to Colonel
Villere, and they read the numbers aloud and
the amount won six times, three times in Spanish
and three times in English, on the principle

50 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

probably of the man in the play who had only
one line, and who spoke that twice, " so that the
audience will know I am saying it."

The two tickets are then handed to young
Barross, who fastens them together with a rub-
ber band and throws them into a basket for fur-
ther reference. Three clerks with duplicate
books keep tally of the numbers and of the prizes
won. The drawing begins generally at six in
the morning and lasts until ten, and then, every-
body having been made rich, the philanthropists
and generals and colonels and Indian girls — and,
let us hope, the men who turned the wheel — go
in to breakfast.

So far as I could see, the drawings are con-
ducted with fairness. But with only 3434 prizes
and 100,000 tickets the chances are so infinitesi-
mal and the advantage to the company so enor-
mous that honesty in manipulating the wheel
ceases to be a virtue, and becomes the lottery's
only advertisement.

But what is most interesting about the lottery
at present is not whether it is or it is not con-
ducted fairly, but that it should exist at all ; that
its promoters should be willing to drag out such
an existence at such a price and in so fallen a
state. This becomes all the more remarkable
because the men who control the lottery belong
to a class which, as a rule, cares for the good
opinion of its fellows, and is willing to sacrifice

THE IGUANAS OF HONDURAS

THE EXILED LOTTERY 53

much to retain it. But the lottery people do
not seem anxious for the good opinion of any
one, and they have made such vast sums of
money in the past, and they have made them so
easily, that they cannot release their hold on the
geese that are laying the golden eggs for them,
even though they find themselves exiled and ex-
communicated by their own countrymen. If
they were thimble-riggers or confidence men in
need of money their persistence would not appear
so remarkable, but these gentlemen of the lottery
are men of enormous wealth, their daughters are
in what is called society in New Orleans and in
New York, their sons are at the universities, and
they themselves belong to those clubs most diffi-
cult of access. One would think that they had
reached that point when they could say " we are
rich enough now, and we can afford to spend
the remainder of our lives in making ourselves re-
spectable." Becky Sharp is authority for the fact
that it is easy to be respectable on as little as five
hundred pounds a year, but these gentlemen, hav-
ing many hundreds of thousands of pounds, are
not even willing to make the effort. Two years
ago, when, according to their own account, they
were losing forty thousand dollars a month,
which, after all, is only what they once cleared in
a day, and when they were being driven out of
one country after another, like the cholera or any
other disease, it geems strange that it never oc-

54 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

curred to them to stop fighting, and to get into
a better business while there was yet time.

Even the keeper of a roulette wheel has too
much self-respect to continue turning when there
is only one man playing against the table, and
in comparison with him the scramble of the lot-
tery company after the Honduranian tin dol-
lar, and the scant savings of servant-girls and of
brakesmen and negro barbers in the United
States, is to me the most curious feature of this
once great enterprise.

What a contrast it makes with those other
days, when the Charles Theatre was filled from
boxes to gallery with the " flower of Southern
chivalry and beauty," when the band played,
and the major-generals proclaimed the result of
the drawings. It is hard to take the lottery se-
riously, for the day when it was worthy of abuse
has passed away. And, indeed, there are few men
or measures so important as to deserve abuse,
while there is no measure if it be for good so insig-
nificant that it is not deserving the exertion of
a good word or a line of praise and gratitude.

And the only emotion one can feel for the lot-
tery now is the pity which you might have experi-
enced for William M. Tweed when, as a fugitive
from justice, he sat on the beach at Santiago de
Cuba and watched a naked fisherman catch his
breakfast for him beyond the first line of break-
ers, or that you might feel for Monte Carlo were

THE EXILED LOTTERY 55

it to be exiled to a fever-stricken island off the
swampy coast of West Africa, or, to pay the lot-
tery a very high compliment indeed, that which
you give to that noble adventurer exiled to the
Isle of Elba.

There was something almost pathetic to me
in the sight of this great, arrogant gambling
scheme, that had in its day brought the good
name of a state into disrepute, that had boasted
of the prices it paid for the honor of men, and
that had robbed a whole nation willing to be
robbed, spinning its wheel in a back room in a
hot, half-barbarous country, and to an audience of
gaping Indians and unwashed Honduranian gen-
erals. Sooner than fall as low as that it would
seem to be better to fall altogether; to own
that you are beaten, that the color has gone
against you too often, and, like that honorable
gambler and gentleman, Mr. John Oakhurst,
who " struck a streak of bad luck about the
middle of February, 1864," to put a pistol to
your head, and go down as arrogantly and de-
fiantly as you had lived.*

* Since this was written, Professor S. H. Woodbridge, of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been successful in
having a bill passed which hinders the lottery still further by
closing to it apparently every avenue of advertisement and corre-
spondence.

The lottery people in consequence are at present negotiating
with the government of Venezuela, and have offered it fifty thou-
sand dollars a year and a share of the earnings for its protection.

HONDURAS

EGUCIGALPA is the odd name of
the capital of the republic of Hon-
duras, the least advanced of the re-
publics of Central or South America.
Somerset had learned that there were no means
of getting to this capital from cither the Pacific
Ocean on one side or from the Caribbean Sea on
the other except on muleback, and we argued
that while there were many mining-camps and
military outposts and ranches situated a nine
days' ride from civilization, capitals at such a
distance were rare, and for that reason might
prove entertaining. Capitals at the mouths of
great rivers and at the junction of many railway
systems we knew, but a capital hidden away be-
hind almost inaccessible mountains, like a mon-
astery of the Greek Church, we had never seen.
A door-mat in the front hall of a house is use-
ful, and may even be ornamental, though it is

IN HONDURAS

57

OUR NAVAL ATTACH^

never interesting; but if the door-mat be hid-
den away in the third-story back room it instantly
assumes an importance and a value which it
never could have attained in its proper sphere of
usefulness.

Our ideas as to the characteristics of Hon-
duras were very vague, and it is possible that we
might never have seen Tegucigalpa had it not
been for Colonel Charles Jeffs, whom we found

58 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

apparently waiting for us at Puerto Cortez, and
who, we still believe, had been stationed there by
some guardian spirit to guide us in safety across
the continent. Colonel Jeffs is a young Ameri-
can mining engineer from Minneapolis, and has
lived in Honduras for the past eleven years.
Some time ago he assisted Bogran, when that
general was president, in one of the revolutions
against him, and was made a colonel in conse-
quence. So we called him our military attache",
and Griscom our naval attache, because he was
an officer of the Naval Brigade of Pennsylvania.
Jeffs we found at Puerto Cortez. It was there
that he first made himself known to us by telling
our porters they had no right to rob us merely
because we were gringos, and so saved us some
dollars. He made us understand at the same
time that it was as gringos, or foreigners, we
were thereafter to be designated and disliked.
We had no agreement with Jeffs, nor even what
might be called an understanding. He had, as
I have said, been intended by Providence to
convey us across Honduras, and every one con-
cerned in the outfit seemed to accept that act
of kindly fate without question. We told him
we were going to the capital, and were on pleas-
ure bent, and he said he had business at the
capital himself, and would like a few days'
shooting on the way, so we asked him to come
with us and act as guide, philosopher, and

IN HONDURAS 59

friend, and he said, " The train starts at eight
to-morrow morning for San Pedro Sula, where I
will hire the mules." And so it was settled, and
we went off to get our things out of the custom-
house with a sense of perfect confidence in our
new acquaintance and of delightful freedom
from all responsibility. And though, perhaps, it
is not always best to put the entire charge of an
excursion through an unknown country into the
hands of the first kindly stranger whom you see
sitting on a hotel porch on landing, we found
that it worked admirably, and we depended on
our military attache so completely that we never
pulled a cinch-strap or interviewed an ex-presi-
dent without first asking his permission. I wish
every traveller as kindly a guide and as good a
friend.

The train to San Pedro Sula was made up of
a rusty engine and three little cars, with no
glass in the windows, and with seats too wide
for one person, and not at all large enough for
two. The natives made a great expedition of
this journey, and piled the cramped seats with
bananas and tortillas and old bottles filled with
drinking-water. We carried no luncheons our-
selves, but we had the greater advantage of
them in that we were enjoying for the first time
the most beautiful stretch of tropical swamp
land and jungle that we came across during our
entire trip through Honduras. Sometimes the

6o

THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

train moved through tunnels of palms as straight
and as regular as the elms leading to an English
country-house, and again through jungles where
they grew in the most wonderful riot and dis-
order, so that their branches swept in through'
the car-windows and brushed the cinders from
the roof. The jungle spread out within a few
feet of the track on either side, and we peered

OUR MILITARY ATTACH^

IN HONDURAS 6l

into an impenetrable net -work of vines and
creepers and mammoth ferns and cacti and giant
trees covered with orchids, and so tall that one
could only see their tops by looking up at them
from the rear platform.

The railroad journey from Puerto Cortez to
San Pedro Sula lasts four hours, but the distance
is only thirty -seven miles. This was, until a
short time ago, when the line was extended by a
New York company, the only thirty-seven miles
of railroad track in Honduras, and as it has
given to the country a foreign debt of $27,992,-
850, the interest on which has not been paid
since 1872, it would seem to be quite enough.
About thirty years ago an interoceanic railroad
was projected from Puerto Cortez to the Pacific
coast, a distance of one hundred and forty-eight
miles, but the railroad turned out to be a co-
lossal swindle, and the government was left with
this debt on its hands, an army of despoiled
stockholders to satisfy, and only thirty- seven
miles of bad road for itself. The road was to
have been paid for at a certain rate per mile,
and the men who mapped it out made it in
consequence twice as long as it need to have
been, and its curves and grades and turns would
cause an honest engineer to weep with disap-
proval.

The grades are in some places very steep, and
as the engine was not as young as it had been,

6 2

THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

two negro boys and a box of sand were placed
on the cow-catcher, and whenever the necessity
of stopping the train was immediate, or when it
was going downhill too quickly, they would

A STKKTCH OK CENTRAL-AMERICAN RAILWAY

lean forward and pour this sand on the rails.
As soon as Griscom and Somerset discovered
these assistant engineers the}' bribed them to
give up their places to them, and after the first

IN HONDURAS 63

station we all sat for the remainder of the jour-
ney on the cow-catcher. It was a beautiful and
exhilarating ride, and suggested tobogganing, or
those thrilling little railroads on trestles at Co-
ney Island and at the fetes around Paris. It was
even more interesting, because we could see each
rusty rail rise as the wheel touched its nearer
end as though it meant to fly up in our faces,
and when the wheel was too quick for it and
forced it down again, it contented itself by
spreading out half a foot or so to one side,
which was most alarming. And the interest rose
even higher at times when a stray steer would
appear on the rails at the end of the tunnel of
palms, as at the end of a telescope, and we saw
it growing rapidly larger and larger as the train
swept down upon it. It always lurched off to
one side before any one was killed, but not until
there had been much ringing of bells and blow-
ing of whistles, and, on our part, some inward
debate as to whether we had better jump and
abandon the train to its fate, or die at our post
with our hands full of sand.

We lay idly at San Pedro Sula for four days,
while Jeffs hurried about collecting mules and
provisions. When we arrived we insisted on
setting forth that same evening, but the place
put its spell upon us gently but firmly, and
when we awoke on the third day and found we
were no nearer to starting than at the moment

64 JHRtE GRINGOS IN CtNlKAL AMERICA

THE THREE GRINGOS

of our arrival, Jeffs's perplexities began to be
something of a bore, and we told him to put
things off to the morrow, as did every one else.

San Pedro Sula lay in peaceful isolation in a
sunny valley at the base of great mountains, and
from the upper porch of our hotel, that had been

IN HONDURAS 65

built when the railroad was expected to continue
on across the continent, we could see above the
palms in the garden the clouds moving from one
mountain -top to another, or lying packed like
drifts of snow in the hollows between. We used
to sit for hours on this porch in absolute idle-
ness, watching Jeffs hurrying in and out below
with infinite pity, while we listened to the palms
rustling and whispering as they bent and cour-
tesied before us, and saw the sunshine turn the
mountains a light green, like dry moss, or leave
half of them dark and sombre when a cloud
passed in between. It was a clean, lazy little
place of many clay huts, with gardens back of
them filled with banana-palms and wide-reach-
ing trees, which were one mass of brilliant crim-
son flowers. In the centre of the town was a
grass -grown plaza where the barefooted and
ragged boy-soldiers went through leisurely evolu-
tions, and the mules and cows gazed at them
from the other end.

Our hotel was leased by an American woman,
who was making an unappreciated fight against
dirt and insects, and the height of whose am-
bition was to get back to Brooklyn and take in
light sewing and educate her two very young
daughters. Her husband had died in the in-
terior, and his portrait hung in the dining-room
of the hotel. She used to talk about him while
she was waiting at dinner, and of what a well-

5

66 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

read and able man he had been. She would
grow so interested in her stories that the dinner
would turn cold while she stood gazing at the
picture and shaking her head at it. We became
very much interested in the husband, and used
to look up over our shoulders at his portrait
with respectful attention, as though he were
present. His widow did not like Honduranians;
and though she might have made enough money
to take her home, had she consented to accept
them as boarders, she would only receive gringos
at her hotel, which she herself swept and scrubbed
when she was not cooking the dinner and mak-
ing the beds. She had saved eight dollars of the
sum necessary to convey her and her children
home, and to educate them when they got there ;
and as American travellers in Honduras are few,
and as most of them ask you for money to help
them to God's country, I am afraid her chance
of seeing the Brooklyn Bridge is very doubtful.
We contributed to her fund, and bought her a
bundle of lottery tickets, which we told her
were the means of making money easily ; and I
should like to add that she won the grand prize,
and lived happily on Brooklyn Heights ever
after; but when we saw the list at Panama, her
numbers were not on it, and so, I fear, she is
still keeping the only clean hotel in Hondu-
ras, which is something more difficult to ac-
complish and a much more public- spirited

IN HONDURAS 69

thing to do than to win a grand prize in a
lottery.

We left San Pedro Sula on a Sunday morn-
ing, with a train of eleven mules ; five to carry
our luggage and the other six for ourselves,
Jeffs, Charl wood, Somerset's servant, and Emilio,
our chief moso, or muleteer. There were two
other mosos, who walked the entire distance, and
in bull-hide sandals at that, guarding and driving
the pack-mules, and who were generally able to
catch up with us an hour or so after we had
halted for the night. I do not know which was
the worst of the mosos, although Emilio seems
to have been first choice with all of us. We
agreed, after it was all over, that we did not so
much regret not having killed them as that they
could not know how frequently they had been
near to sudden and awful death.

The people of Honduras, where all the travel-
ling is done on mule or horse back, have a pretty
custom of riding out to meet a friend when he
is known to be coming to town, and of accom-
panying him when he departs. This latter cere-
mony always made me feel as though I were an
undesirable citizen who was being conveyed out-
side of the city limits by a Vigilance Committee ;
but it is very well meant, and a man in Hon-
duras measures his popularity by the number
of friends who come forth to greet him on his
arrival, or who speed him on his way when he

70 THREE GRINT.OS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

sets forth again. We were accompanied out of
San Pedro Sula by the consular agent, the able
American manager of the thirty-seven miles
of railroad, an'd his youthful baggage-master, a
young gentleman whom I had formerly known
in the States.

Our escort left us at the end of a few miles,
at the foot of the mountains, and we began the
ascent alone. From that time on until we
reached the Pacific Ocean we moved at the rate
of three miles an hour, or some nine leagues a
day, as distances are measured in Honduras, ten
hours being a day's journey. Our mules were
not at all the animals that we know as mules in
the States, but rather overgrown donkeys or
burros, and not much stouter than those in the
streets of Cairo, whether it be the Street in
Cairo of Chicago, or the one that runs in front
of Shepheard's Hotel. They were patient, plucky,
and wonderfully sure-footed little creatures, and
so careful of their own legs and necks that, after
the first few hours, we ceased to feel any anxiety
about our own, and left the entire charge of the
matter to them.

I think we were all a little startled at sight of
the trail we were expected to follow, but if we
were we did not say so — at least, not before Jeffs.
It led almost directly up the face of the moun-
tain, along little ledges and pathways cut in
the solid rock, and at times was so slightly

iN HONDURAS 73

marked that we could not see it five yards ahead
of us. On that first day, during which the trail
was always leading upward, the mules did not
once put down any one of their four little feet
withe at first testing the spot upon which it was
to rest. This made our progress slow, but it
gave one a sense of security, which the angle
and attitude of the body of the man in front
did much to dissipate. I do not know the
name of the mountains over which we passed,
nor do I know the name of any mountain in
Honduras, except those which we named our-
selves, for the reason that there is not much in
Honduras except mountains, and it would be as
difficult to give a name to each of her many
peaks as to christen every town site on a Western
prairie. When the greater part of all the earth
of a country stands on edge in the air, it would
be invidious to designate any one particular hill
or chain of hills. A Honduranian deputy once
crumpled up a page of letter-paper in his hand
and dropped it on the desk before him. " That,"
he said, " is an outline map of Honduras."

We rode in single file, with Jeffs in front,
followed by Somerset, with Griscom and myself
next, and Charlwood, the best and most faith-
ful of servants, bringing up the rear. The pack-
mules, as I have said, were two hours farther
back, and we could sometimes see them over
the edge of a precipice crawling along a thou-

74

THRKK C.RWOOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

sand feet below and behind us. It seemed an
unsociable way for friends to travel through a
strange country, and I supposed that in an hour

or so \ve would come
to a broader trail and
pull up abreast and
exchange tobacco
pouches and grow
better acquainted.
But we never came
to that broad trail
until we had trav-
elled sixteen days,
and had left Tegu-
cigalpa behind us,
and in the fore-
ground of all the
pictures I have in
my mind of Hondu-
ras there is always a
row of men's backs
and shoulders and
bobbing helmets dis-
appearing down a
slippery path of rock,
or rising above the

SOMERSET , c i. •

edge of a mountain
and outlined against

a blazing blue sky. We were generally near
enough to one another to talk if we spoke in

IN HONDURAS 75

a loud voice or turned in the saddle, though
sometimes we rode silently, and merely raised
an arm to point at a beautiful valley below or
at a strange bird on a tree, and kept it rigid
until the man behind said, " Yes, I see," when
it dropped, like a semaphore signal after the
train has passed.

Early in the afternoon of the day of our set-
ting forth we saw for the last time the thatched
roofs of San Pedro Sula, like a bare spot in the
great green plain hundreds of feet below us,
and then we passed through the clouds we had
watched from the town itself, and bade the
eastern coast of Honduras a final farewell.

The trail we followed was so rough and uncer-
tain that at first I conceived a very poor opinion
of the Honduranians for not having improved it,
but as we continued scrambling upward I ad-
mired them for moving about at all under such
conditions. After all, we who had chosen to
take this road through curiosity had certainly no
right to complain of what was to the natives
their only means of communication with the At-
lantic seaboard. It is interesting to think of a
country absolutely and entirely dependent on
such thoroughfares for every necessity of life.
For whether it be a postal card or a piano, or a
bale of cotton, or a box of matches, it must be
brought to Tegucigalpa on the back of a mule
or on the shoulders of a man, who must slip and

76 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

slide and scramble either over this trail or the
one on the western coast.

Sometimes this high-road of commerce was cut
through the living rock in steps as even and sharp
as those in front of a brownstone house on Fifth
Avenue, and so narrow that we had to draw up
our knees to keep them from being scratched
and cut on the rough walls of the passageway,
and again it led through jungle so dense that
if one wandered three yards from the trail he
could not have found his way back again ; but
this danger was not imminent, as no one could
go that far from the trail without having first
hacked and cut his way there.

It was not always so difficult ; at times we
came out into bare open spaces, and rode up the
dry bed of a mountain stream, and felt the full
force of the sun, or again it led along a ledge of
rock two feet wide at the edge of a precipice, and
we were fanned with cool, damp breaths from the
pit a thousand feet belo\v, where the sun had
never penetrated, and where the moss and fern
of centuries grew in a thick, dark tangle.

We stopped for our first meal at a bare place
on the top of a mountain, where there were a
half-dozen mud huts. Jeffs went from one to
another of these and collected a few eggs, and
hired a woman to cook them and to make us
some coffee. We added tinned things and bread
to this luncheon, which, as there were no benches,

A DRAWER OK WATER

IN HONDURAS 79

we ate seated on the ground, kicking at the dogs
and pigs and chickens, that snatched in a most
familiar manner at the food in our hands. In
Honduras there are so few hotels that travellers
are entirely dependent for food and for a place
in which to sleep upon the people who live along
the trail, who are apparently quite hardened to
having their homes invaded by strangers, and
their larders levied upon at any hour of the day
or night.

Even in the larger towns and so-called cities
we slept in private houses, and on the solitary
occasion when we were directed to a hotel we
found a bare room with a pile of canvas cots
heaped in one corner, to which we were told to
help ourselves. There was a real hotel, and a
very bad one, at the capital, where we fared much
worse than we had often done in the interior ;
but with these two exceptions we were depend-
ent for shelter during our entire trip across Hon-
duras upon the people of the country. Some-
times they sent us to sleep in the town-hall, which
was a large hut with a mud floor, and furnished
with a blackboard and a row of benches, and
sometimes with stocks for prisoners ; for it served
as a school or prison or hotel, according to the
needs of the occasion.

We were equally dependent upon the natives
for our food. We carried breakfast bacon and
condensed milk and sardines and bread with us,

80 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

and to these we were generally able to add, at
least once a day, coffee and eggs and beans. The
national bread is the tortilla. It is made of corn-
meal, patted into the shape of a buckwheat cake
between the palms of the hands, and then baked.
They were generally given to us cold, in a huge
pile, and were burned on both sides, but untouched
by heat in the centre. The coffee was always
excellent, as it should have been, for the Hon-
duranian coffee is as fine as any grown in Central
America, and we never had too much of it ; but
of eggs and black beans there was no end. The
black-bean habit in Honduras is very general ;
they gave them to us three times a day, some-
times cold and sometimes hot, sometimes with
bacon and sometimes alone. They were fre-
quently served to us in the shape of sandwiches
between tortillas, and again in the form of pud-
ding with chopped-up goat's meat. At first, and
when they were served hot, I used to think them
delicious. That seems very long ago now. When
I was at Johnstown at the time of the flood, there
was a soda cracker, with jam inside, which was
served out to the correspondents in place of
bread ; and even now, if it became a question of
my having to subsist on those crackers, and the
black beans of Central America, or starve, I am
sure I should starve, and by preference.

We were naturally embarrassed at first when
we walked into strange huts; but the owners

IN HONDURAS 8 I

seemed to take such invasions with apathy and
as a matter of course, and were neither glad to
see us when we came, nor relieved when we de-
parted. They asked various prices for what they
gave us — about twice as much as they would
have asked a native for the same service ; at least,
so Jeffs told us; but as our bill never amounted
to more than fifty cents apiece for supper, lodg-
ing, and a breakfast the next morning, they can-
not be said to have robbed us. While the wom-
an at the first place at which we stopped boiled
the eggs, her husband industriously whittled a
lot of sharp little sticks, which he distributed
among us, and the use of which we could not
imagine, until we were told we were expected
to spike holes in the eggs with them, and then
suck out the meat. We did not make a success
of this, and our prejudice against eating eggs
after that fashion was such that we were partic-
ular to ask to have them fried during the rest of
our trip. This was the only occasion when I saw
a Honduranian husband help his wife to work.

After our breakfast on the top of the moun-
tain, we began its descent on the other side.
This was much harder on the mules than the
climbing had been, and they stepped even more
slowly, and so gave us many opportunities to
look out over the tops of trees and observe
with some misgivings the efforts of the man in
front to balance the mule by lying flat on its
6

82 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

hind-quarters. The temptation at such times
to sit upright and see into what depths you
were going next was very great. We struck a
level trail about six in the evening, and the mules
were so delighted at this that they started off of
their own accord at a gallop, and were further
encouraged by our calling them by the names of
different Spanish generals. This inspired them
to such a degree that we had to change their
names to Bob Ingersoll or Senator Hill, or oth-
ers to the same effect, at which they grew dis-
couraged and drooped perceptibly.

We slept that night at a ranch called La Pieta,
belonging to Dr. Miguel Pazo, where we experi-
mented for the first time with our hammocks,
and tried to grow accustomed to going to bed
under the eyes of a large household of Indian
maidens, mosos, and cowboys. There are men
who will tell you that they like to sleep in a
hammock, just as there are men who will tell
you that they like the sea best when it is rough,
and that they arc happiest when the ship is
throwing them against the sides and superstruct-
ure, and when they cannot sit still without brac-
ing their legs against tables and stanchions. I
always want to ask such men if they would pre-
fer land in a state of perpetual earthquake, or in
its normal condition of steadiness, and I have al-
ways been delighted to hear sea-captains declare
themselves best pleased with a level keel, and the

IN HONDURAS 83

chance it gives them to go about their work with-
out having to hang on to hand-rails. And I had
a feeling of equal satisfaction when I saw as many
sailors as could find room sleeping on the hard
deck of a man-of-war at Colon, in preference to
suspending themselves in hammocks, which were
swinging empty over their heads. The ham-
mock keeps a man at an angle of forty-five de-
grees, with the weight of both his legs and his
body on the base of the spinal column, which
gets no rest in consequence.

The hammock is, however, almost universally
used in Honduras, and is a necessity there on ac-
count of the insects and ants and other beasts
that climb up the legs of cots and inhabit the
land. But the cots of bull -hide stretched on
ropes are, in spite of the insects, greatly to be
preferred ; they are at least flat, and one can lie
on them without having his legs three feet higher
than his head. Their manufacture is very sim-
ple. When a steer is killed its hide is pegged
out on the ground, and left where the dogs can
eat what flesh still adheres to it ; and when it
has been cleaned after this fashion and the sun
has dried it, ropes of rawhide are run through
its edges, and it is bound to a wooden frame
with the hairy side up. It makes a cool, hard
bed. In the poorer huts the hides are given to
the children at night, and spread directly on the
earth floor. During the day the same hides are

84 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

used to hold the coffee, which is piled high upon
them and placed in the sun to dry.

We left La Pieta early the next morning, in
the bright sunlight, but instead of climbing labo-
riously into the sombre mountains of the day
before, we trotted briskly along a level path be-
tween sunny fields and delicate plants, and trees
with a pale-green foliage, and covered with the
most beautiful white-and-purple flowers. There
were hundreds of doves in the air, and in the
bushes many birds of brilliant blue-and-black or
orange-and-scarlet plumage, and one of more so-
ber colors with two long white tail-feathers and a
white crest, like a macaw that had turned Quaker.
None of these showed the least inclination to
disturb himself as we approached. An hour af-
ter our setting forth we plunged into a forest of
manacca-palms, through which we rode the rest
of the morning. This was the most beautiful
and wonderful experience of our journey. The
manacca-palm differs from the cocoanut or royal
palm in that its branches seem to rise directly
from the earth, and not to sprout, as do the oth-
ers, from the top of a tall trunk. Each branch
has a single stem, and the leaf spreads and falls
from cither side of this, cut into even blades,
like a giant fern.

There is a plant that looks like the manacca-
palm at home which you see in flower-pots in the
corners of drawing-rooms at weddings, and conse-

IN HONDURAS 87

quently when we saw the real manacca-palm the
effect was curious. It did not seem as though
they were monster specimens of these little plants
in the States, but as though we had grown small-
er. We felt dwarfed, as though we had come
across a rose-bush as large as a tree. The branch-
es of these palms were sixty feet high, and occa-
sionally six feet broad, and bent and swayed and
interlaced in the most graceful and exquisite con-
fusion. Every blade trembled in the air, and for
hours we heard no other sound save their perpet-
ual murmur and rustle. Not even the hoofs of
our mules gave a sound, for they trod on the dead
leaves of centuries. The palms made a natural
archway for us, and the leaves hung like a por-
tiere across the path, and you would see the man
riding in front raise his arm and push the long
blades to either side, and disappear as they fell
again into place behind him. It was like a scene
on the tropical island of a pantomime, where ev-
ery thing is exaggerated both in size and in beau-
ty. It made you think of a giant aquarium or
conservatory which had been long neglected.

At every hundred yards or so there were
giant trees with smooth gray trunks, as even and
regular as marble, and with roots like flying-but-
tresses, a foot in thickness, and reaching from
ten to fifteen feet up from the ground. If these
flanges had been covered over, a man on mule-
back could have taken refuge between them.

88 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

Some of the trunks of these trees were covered
with intricate lace -work of a parasite which
twisted in and out, and which looked as though
thousands of snakes were crawling over the
white surface of the tree ; they were so much
like snakes that one passed beneath them with
an uneasy shrug. Hundreds of orchids clung to
the branches of the trees, and from these stouter
limbs to the more pliable branches of the palms
below white- faced monkeys sprang and swung
from tree to tree, running along the branches
until they bent with the weight like a trout-rod,
and sprang upright again with a sweep and rush
as the monkeys leaped off chattering into the
depths of the forest. We rode through this
enchanted wilderness of wavering sunlight and
damp, green shadows for the greater part of the
day, and came out finally into a broad, open
plain, cut up by little bubbling streams, flashing
brilliantly in the sun. It was like an awakening
from a strange and beautiful nightmare.

In the early part of the afternoon we arrived
at another one of the farm-houses belonging to
young Dr. Pa/,o, and at which he and his brother
happened to be stopping. We had ridden out
of our way there in the hopes of obtaining a few
days' shooting, and the place seemed to promise
much sport. The Chamdicon River, filled with
fish and alligators, ran within fifty yards of the
house ; and great forests, in which there were

IN A CENTRAL- AMERICAN FOREST

IN HONDURAS 9!

bear and deer and wild-pig, stretched around it
and beyond it on every side. The house itself
was like almost every other native hut in Hon-
duras. They are all built very much alike, with
no attempt at ornamentation within, or land-
scape-gardening without, although nature has
furnished the most beautiful of plants and trees
close on every side for just such a purpose. The
walls of a Honduranian hut are made of mud
packed round a skeleton of interwoven rods ;
the floor is of the naked earth, and the roof is
thatched with the branches of palms. After the
house is finished, all of the green stuff growing
around and about it is cleared away for fifty
yards or so, leaving an open place of bare and
barren mud. This is not decorative, but it helps
in some measure to keep the insects which cling
to every green thing away from the house. A
kitchen of similarly interlaced rods and twigs,
but without the clay, and covered with just such
layers of palm leaves, stands on the bare place
near the house, or leans against one side of it.
This is where the tortillas are patted and baked,
and the rice and beans are boiled, and the raw
meat of an occasional goat or pig is hung to
dry and smoke over the fire. The oven in the
kitchen is made of baked clay, and you seldom
see any cooking utensils or dishes that have
not been manufactured from the trees near the
house or the earth beneath it. The water for

92 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

drinking and cooking is kept in round jars of red
clay, which stand in rings of twisted twigs to
keep them upright, and the drinking-vessels are
the halves of gourds, and the ladles are whole
gourds, with the branch on which they grew still
adhering to them, to serve as a handle.

The furnishing of the house shows the same
dependence upon nature; the beds arc either grass
hammocks or the rawhide that 1 have described,
and there arc no chairs and few benches, the peo-
ple preferring apparently to eat sitting on their
haunches to taking the trouble necessary to
make a chair. Everything they eat, of which
there is very little variety, grows just beyond
the cleared place around the hut, and can be
had at the cost of the little energy necessary to
bring it in-doors. When a kid or a pig or a
steer is killed, the owner goes out to the near-
est peak and blows a blast on a cow's horn,
and those within hearing who wish fresh meat
hurry across the mountain to purchase it. As
there is no ice from one end of Honduras to the
other, meat has to be eaten the day it is killed.

This is not the life of the Honduranians who
live in the large towns or so-called cities, where
there are varying approaches to the comfort of
civili/.ed countries, but of the country people
with whom we had chiefly to do. It is as near
an approach to the condition of primitive man
as one can find on this continent.

IN HONDURAS 93

But bare and poor as are the houses, which are
bare not because the people are poor, but because
they are indolent, there is almost invariably some
corner of the hut set aside and ornamented as an
altar, or some part of the wall covered with pict-
ures of a religious meaning. When they have no
table, the people use a shelf or the stump of a
tree upon which to place emblematic figures,
which are almost always china dolls, with no
original religious significance, but which they
have dressed in little scraps of tinsel and silk,
and which they have surrounded with sardine-
tins and empty bottles and pictures from the
lids of cigar- boxes. Everything that has color
is cherished, and every traveller who passes adds
unconsciously to their stock of ornaments in the
wrappings of the boxes which he casts away be-
hind him. Sometimes the pictures they use for
ornamentation are not half so odd as the fact
that they ever should have reached such a wil-
derness. We were frequently startled by the
sight of colored lithographs of theatrical stars,
advertising the fact that they were playing under
the direction of such and such a manager, and
patent- medicine advertisements and wood- cuts
from illustrated papers, some of them twenty
and thirty years old, which were pinned to the
mud walls and reverenced as gravely as though
they had been pictures of the Holy Family by a
Raphael or a Murillo.

94 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

In one hut we found a life-size colored litho-
graph of a woman whom, it so happened, we all
knew, which was being used to advertise a sewing-
machine. We were so pleased at meeting a fa-
miliar face so far from home that we bowed to
it very politely, and took off our hats, at which
the woman of the house, mistaking our deference,
placed it over the altar, fearing that she had been
entertaining an angel unawares.

The house of Dr. Pazo, where we were most
hospitably entertained, was similar to those that
I have described. It was not his home, but
what we would call a hunting-box or a ranch.
While we were at luncheon he told a boy to see
if there were any alligators in sight, in exactly
the same tone with which he might have told a
servant to find out if the lawn-tennis net were in
place. The boy returned to say that there were
five within a hundred yards of the house. So,
after we had as usual patiently waited for Griscom
to finish his coffee, we went out on the bank and
fired at the unhappy alligators for the remainder
of the afternoon. It did not seem to hurt them
very much, and certainly did us a great deal of
good. To kill an alligator it is necessary to hit
it back of the fore -leg, or to break its spine
where it joins the tail ; and as it floats with only
its eyes and a half-inch of its nose exposed, it is
difficult to reach either of these vital spots.
When the alligator is on a bank, and you at-

IN HONDURAS 95

tempt to crawl up on it along the opposite bank,
the birds make such a noise, either on its ac-
count or on their own, that it takes alarm, and
rolls over into the water with an abruptness you
would hardly expect from so large a body.

On our second day at Dr. Pazo's ranch we
divided into two parties, and scoured the wilder-
ness for ten miles around after game. One party
was armed with shot- guns, and brought back
macaws of wonderful plumage, wild turkeys, and
quail in abundance ; the others, scorning any-
thing but big game, carried rifles, and, as a re-
sult, returned as they set forth, only with fewer
cartridges. It was most unfortunate that the
only thing worth shooting came to me. It was
a wild-cat with a long tail, who patiently waited
for us in an open place with a calm and curious
expression of countenance. I think I was more
surprised than he was, and even after I had
thrown up the ground under his white belly he
stopped and turned again to look at me in a
hurt and reproachful manner before he bounded
gracefully out of sight into the underbrush. We
also saw a small bear, but he escaped in the
same manner, without waiting to be fired upon,
and as we had no dogs to send after him, we
gave up looking for more, and went back to pot
at alligators. There were some excellent hunt-
ing-dogs on the ranch, but the Pazo brothers
had killed a steer the night we arrived, and had

96 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

given most of it to the dogs, so that in the
morning they were naturally in no mood for
hunting.

There was an old grandfather of an alligator
whom Somerset and I had repeatedly disturbed
in his slumbers. He liked to take his siestas on
a little island entirely surrounded by rapids, and
we used to shoot at him from the opposite bank
of the river. He was about thirteen feet long,
and the agility with which he would flop over
into the calm little bay, which stretched out from
the point on which he slept, was as remarkable
as it was disappointing. He was still asleep at
his old stand when we returned from our unsuc-
cessful shooting tour, so we decided to swim the
rapids and crawl up on him across his little island
and attack him from the flank and rear. It re-
minded me somewhat of the taking of Lungten-
pen on a small scale. On that occasion, if I
remember correctly, the raw recruits were uni-
formed only in Martinis and cartridge-belts ; but
we decided to carry our boots as well, because
the alligator's island was covered with sharp
stones and briers, and the sand was very hot, and,
moreover, we had but vague ideas about the cus-
toms of alligators, and were not sure as to
whether he might not chase us. We thought
we would look very silly running around a little-
island pursued by a long crocodile and treading
on sharp hot stones in our bare feet.

IN HONDURAS 99

So each of us took his boots in one hand and
a repeating-rifle in the other, and with his money-
belt firmly wrapped around his neck, plunged
into the rapids and started to ford the river.
They were exceedingly swift rapids, and made you
feel as though you were swinging round a sharp
corner on a cable-car with no strap by which to
take hold. The only times I could stop at all
was when I jammed my feet in between two
stones at the bed of the river, and was so held
in a vise, while the rest of my body swayed
about in the current and my boots scooped up
the water. When I wanted to go farther I
would stick my toes between two more rocks,
and so gradually worked my way across, but I
could see nothing of Somerset, and decided that
he had been drowned, and went off to avenge
him on the alligator. It took me some time to
get my bruised and bleeding toes into the wet
boots, during which time I kept continually look-
ing over my shoulder to see if the alligator were
going to make a land attack, and surprise me
instead of my surprising him. I knew he was
very near me, for the island smelled as strongly of
musk as a cigar-shop smells of tobacco ; but when
I crawled up on him he was still on his point of
sand, and sound asleep. I had a very good
chance at seventy yards, but I was greedy, and
wanted to come closer, and as I was crawling
along, gathering thorns and briers by the way, I

IOO THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

startled about fifty birds, and the alligator flopped
over again, and left nothing behind him but a
few tracks on the land and a muddy streak in
the water. It was a great deal of trouble for a
very little of alligator; but I was more or less
consoled on my return to find that Somerset
was still alive, and seated on the same bank from
which we had both started, though at a point
fifty yards farther down-stream. He was en-
gaged in counting out clamp Bank- of - England
notes on his bare knee, and blowing occasional
blasts down the barrel of his rifle, which had
dragged him and itself to the bottom of the
river before the current tossed them both back
on the shore.

The two days of rest at the ranch of Dr. Pazo
had an enervating effect upon our mules, and
they moved along so slowly on the day following
that we had to feel our way through the night
for several hours before we came to the hut
where we were to sleep. Griscom and I had lost
ourselves on the mountain-side, and did not over-
take the others until long after they had settled
themselves in the compound. They had been
too tired when they reached it to do anything
more after falling off their mules, and we found
them stretched on the ground in the light of a
couple of fluttering pine torches, with cameras
and saddle-bags and carbines scattered recklessly
about, and the mules walking over them in the

IN HONDURAS 103'

darkness. A fire in the oven shone through the
chinks in the kitchen wall, and showed the
woman of the house stirring something in a cal-
dron with one hand and holding her sleeping
child on her hip with the other, while the daugh-
ters moved in and out of the shadow, carrying
jars on their heads and bundles of fodder for the
animals. It looked like a gypsy encampment.
We sent Emilio back with a bunch of pine torches
to find the pack-mules, and we could see his
lighted torch blazing far up the trail that we had
just descended, and lighting the rocks and trees
on either side of him.

There was only room for one of us to sleep in-
side the hut that night, and as Griscom had a
cold, that privilege was given to him ; but it
availed him little, for when he seated himself on
the edge of the bull-hide cot and began to pull
off his boots, five ghostly feminine figures sat up-
right in their hammocks and studied his prep-
arations with the most innocent but embarrass-
ing curiosity. So, after waiting some little time
for them to go to sleep again, he gave up any
thought of making himself more comfortable,
and slept in his boots and spurs.

We passed through the pretty village of Trini-
dad early the next morning, and arrived at night-
fall at the larger town of Santa Barbara, where
the sound of our mules' hoofs pattering over the
paved streets and the smell of smoking street

104 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

lamps came to us with as much of a shock as
docs the sight of land after a week at sea. Santa
Barbara, in spite of its pavements, was not a
great metropolis, and, owing to its isolation, the
advent of five strangers was so much of an event
that the children of the town followed us, cheer-
ing and jeering as though we were a circus pro-
cession ; they blocked the house in which we
took refuge, on every side, so that the native
policemen had to be stationed at our windows
to wave them away. On the following morning
we called to pay our respects on General Louis
Bogran, who has been President of Honduras
for eight years and an exile for two. He died
a few months after our visit. He was a very
handsome man, with a fine presence, and with
great dignity of manner, and he gave us an
audience exactly as though he were a de-
throned monarch and we loyal subjects come
to pay him homage in his loneliness. I asked
him what he regarded as the best work of his
administration, and after thinking awhile he
answered, " Peace for eight years," which was
rather happy, when you consider that in the
three years since he had left office there have
been four presidents and two long and serious
revolutions, and when we were in the capital the
people seemed to think it was about time to
begin on another.

We left Santa Barbara early the next morn-

IN HONDURAS 105

ing, and rode over a few more mountains to the
town of Seguaca, where the village priest was
holding a festival, and where the natives for
many miles around had gathered in consequence.

GENERAL LOUIS BOGRAN

There did not seem to be much of interest
going on when we arrived, for the people of the
town and the visitors within her gates deserted
the booths and followed us in a long procession

106 THRKK GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

down the single street, and invaded the house
where we lunched.

Our host on this occasion set a table for us in
the centre of his largest room, and the popula-
tion moved in through the doors and windows,
and seated themselves cross-legged in rows ten
and fifteen deep on the earth floor at our feet,
and regarded us gravely and in absolute silence.
Those who could not find standing-room inside
stood on the window-sills and blocked the door-
ways, and the women were given places of
honor on tables and beds. It was somewhat
embarrassing, and we felt as though we ought to
offer something more unusual than the mere
exercise of eating in order to justify such in-
terest ; so we attempted various parlor tricks,
without appearing to notice the presence of an
audience, and pretended to swallotv the eggs
whole, and made knives and forks disappear in
the air, and drew silver dollars from the legs of
the table, continuing our luncheon in the mean-
time in a self-possessed and polite manner, as
though such eccentricities were our hourly habit.
We could see the audience, out of the corner of
our eyes, leaning forward with their eyes and
mouths wide open, and were so encouraged that
we called up some of the boys and drew watches
and dollars out of their heads, after which they
retired into corners and ransacked their scantily
clad persons for more. It was rather an ex-

IN HONDURAS 109

pensive exhibition, for when we set forth again
they all laid claim to the dollars of which they
considered they had been robbed.

The men of the place, according to their
courteous custom, followed us out of the town
for a few miles, and then we all shook hands and
exchanged cigars and cigarettes, and separated
with many compliments and expressions of high
esteem.

The trail from Seguaca to our next resting-place
led through pine forests and over layers of pine-
needles that had been accumulating for years.
It was a very warm, dry afternoon, and the air
was filled with the odor of the pines, and when
we came to one of the many mountain streams
we disobeyed Jeffs and stopped to bathe in it,
and let it carry us down the side of the moun-
tain with the speed of a toboggan. We had
been told that bathing at any time was extreme-
ly dangerous in Honduras, and especially so
in the afternoon ; but we always bathed in the
afternoon, and looked forward to the half-hour
spent in one of these roaring rapids as the best
part of the day. Of all our recollections" of
Honduras, they are certainly the pleasantest.
The water was almost icily cold, and fell with
a rush and a heavy downpour in little water-
falls, or between great crevices in the solid
rocks, leaping and bubbling and flashing in the
sun, or else sweeping in swift eddies in the com-

I 10 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

pass of deep, shadowy pools. We used to im-
prison ourselves between two rocks and let a fall
of water strike us from the distance of several
feet on our head and shoulders, or tear past and
around us, so that in five minutes the soreness
and stiffness of the day's ride were rubbed out
of us as completely as though we had been
massaged at a Turkish bath, and the fact that
we were always bruised and black and blue when
we came out could not break us of this habit.
It was probably because we were new to the
country that we suffered no great harm ; for
Jeffs, who was an old inhabitant, and who had
joined us in this particular stream for the first
time, came out looking twenty years older, and
in an hour his teeth were chattering with chills
or clinched with fever, and his pulse was jump-
ing at one hundred and three. We were then
exactly six days' hard riding from any civilized
place, and though we gave him quinine and
whiskey and put him into his hammock as soon
as we reached a hut, the evening is not a cheer-
ful one to remember. It would not have been
a cheerful evening under any circumstances, for
we shared the hut with the largest and most
varied collection of human beings, animals, and
insects that I have ever seen gathered into so
small a place.

I took an account of stock before I turned in,
and found that there were three dogs, eleven

IN HONDURAS III

cats, seven children, five men, not including five
of us, three women, and a dozen chickens, all
sleeping, or trying to sleep, in the same room,
under the one roof. And when I gave up at-
tempting to sleep and wandered out into the
night, I stepped on the pigs, and startled three
or four calves that had been sleeping under the
porch and that lunged up out of the darkness.
We were always asking Jeffs why we slept in
such places, instead of swinging our hammocks
under the trees and camping out decently and
in order, and his answer was that while there
were insects enough in-doors, they were virtually
an extinct species when compared to the num-
ber one would meet in the open air.

I have camped in our West, where all you
need is a blanket to lie upon and another to
wrap around you, and a saddle for a pillow, and
where, with a smouldering fire at your feet, you
can sleep without thought of insects. But there
is nothing green that grows in Honduras that is
not saturated and alive with bugs, and all man-
ner of things that creep and crawl and sting and
bite. It transcends mere discomfort ; it is an
absolute curse to the country, and to every one
in it, and it would be as absurd to write of Hon-
duras without dwelling on the insects, as of the
west coast of Africa without speaking of the
fever. You cannot sit on the grass or on a fallen
tree, or walk under an upright one or through

112 THREE (1RINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

the bushes, without hundreds of some sort of
animal or other attaching themselves to your
clothing or to your person. And if you get
clown from your mule to take a shot at some-
thing in the bushes and walk but twenty feet
into them, you have to be beaten with brushes
and rods when you come out again as vigorously
as though you were a dusty carpet. There will
be sometimes as many as a hundred insects
under one leaf ; and after they have once laid
their claws upon you, your life is a mockery,
and you feel at night as though you were sleep-
ing in a bed with red pepper. The mules have
even a harder time of it ; for, as if they did not
suffer enough in the day, they are in constant
danger at night from vampires, which fasten
themselves to the neck and suck out the blood,
leaving them so weak that often when we came
to saddle them in the morning they would stag-
ger and almost fall. Sometimes the side of
their head and shoulders would be wet with
their own blood. I never heard of a vampire
attacking a man in that country, but the fact
that they are in the air does not make one sleep
any the sounder.

In the morning after our night with the varied
collection of men and animals we put back again
to the direct trail to Tegucigalpa, from which
place we were still distant a seven days' ride.

II

WE swung our hammocks on the sixth .night
out in the municipal building of Tabla Ve ; but
there was little sleep. Towards morning the
night turned bitterly cold, and the dampness rose
from the earthen floor of the hut like a breath
from the open door of a refrigerator, and kept us
shivering in spite of sweaters and rubber blankets.
Above, the moon and stars shone brilliantly in a
clear sky, but down in the valley in which the
village lay, a mist as thick as the white smoke
of a locomotive rose out of the ground to the
level of the house-tops, and hid Tabla Ve as
completely as though it were at the bottom of
a lake. The dogs of the village moved through
the mist, howling dismally, and meeting to fight
with a sudden sharp tumult of yells that made
us start up in our hammocks and stare at each
other sleepily, while Jeffs rambled on, muttering
and moaning in his fever. It was not a pleasant
night, and we rode up the mountain-side out of
the mist the next morning unrefreshed, but satis-
fied to be once more in the sunlight. They had
told us at Tabla Ve that there was to be a bull-
baiting that same afternoon at the village of

114 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

Seguatepec, fifteen miles over the mountain,
where a priest was holding a church festival.
So we left Jeffs to push along with the mozos,
and by riding as fast as the mules could go, we
reached Seguatepec by four in the afternoon.

A VIl.l.AGK IN THK INTERIOR

It was a bright, clean town, sitting pertly on
the flat top of a hill that fell away from it evenly
on every side. It had a little church and a little
plaza, and the church was so vastly superior to
every other house in the place — as was the case

IN HONDURAS 115

in every village through which we passed — as to
make one suppose that it had been built by one
race of people and the houses by another. The
plaza was shut in on two of its sides by a barrier
seven rails high, held together by ox-hide ropes.
This barrier, with the houses fronting the plaza
on its two other sides, formed the arena in which
the bull was to be set at liberty. All of the
windows and a few of the doors of the houses
were barred, and the open places between were*
filled up by ramparts of logs. There was no
grand-stand, but every one contributed a bench
or a table from his own house, and the women
seated themselves on these, while the men and
boys perched on the upper rail of the barricade.
The occasion was a memorable one, and all the
houses were hung with strips of colored linen,
and the women wore their brilliant silk shawls,
and a band of fifteen boys, none of whom could
have been over sixteen years of age, played a
weird overture to the desperate business of the
afternoon.

It was a somewhat primitive and informal bull-
fight, and it began with their lassoing the bull
by his horns and hoofs, and dragging him head
first against the barricade. With a dozen men
pulling on the lariat around the horns from the
outside of the ring, and two more twisting his
tail on the inside, he was at such an uncomfort-
able disadvantage that it was easy for them to

Il6 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

harness him in a net-work of lariats, and for a
bold rider to seat himself on his back. The bold
rider wore spurs on his bare feet, and, with his
toes stuck in the ropes around the bull's body,
he grasped the same ropes with one hand, and
with the other hand behind him held on to the
bull's tail as a man holds the tiller of a boat.
When the man felt himself firmly fixed, and the
bull had been poked into a very bad temper
with spears and sharp sticks, the lariat around
his horns was cut, and he started up and off on
a frantic gallop, bucking as vigorously as a Texas
pony, and trying to gore the man clinging to his
back with backward tosses of his horns.

There was no regular toreador, and any one
who desired to sacrifice himself to make a Sagua-
tepecan holiday was at liberty to do so ; and as a
half-dozen men so sought distinction, and as the
bull charged at anything on two legs, the excite-
ment was intense. He moved very quickly for
so huge an animal in spite of his heavy handicap,
and, with the exception of one man with a red
flag and a spirit of daring not entirely due to
natural causes, no one cared to go very near him.
So he pawed up and down the ring, tossing and
bucking and making himself as disagreeable to
the man on his back as he possibly could. It
struck me that it would be a distinctly sporting
act to photograph a bull while he was charging
head on at the photographer, and it occurred to

IN HONDURAS 117

Somerset and Griscom at about the same time
that it would be pleasant to confront a very mad
bull while he was careering about with a man
twisting his tail. So we all dropped into the
arena at about the same moment, from different
sides, and as we were gringos, our appearance
was hailed with laughter and yells of encourage-
ment. The gentleman on the bull seemed to be
able to control him more or less by twisting his
tail to one side or the other, and as soon as he
heard the shouts that welcomed us he endeavored
to direct the bull's entire attention to my two
young friends. Griscom and Somerset are six
feet high, even without riding-boots and pith
helmets, and with them they were so conspic-
uous that the bull was properly incensed, and
made them hurl themselves over the barricade
in such haste that they struck the ground on the
other side at about the same instant that he
butted the rails, and with about the same amount
of force.

Shrieks and yells of delight rose from the
natives at this delightful spectacle, and it was
generally understood that we had been engaged
to perform in our odd costumes for their special
amusement, and the village priest attained gen-
uine popularity for this novel feature. The bull-
baiting continued for some time, and as I kept
the camera in my own hands, there is no docu-
mentary evidence to show that any one ran ,away

Il8 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

but Griscom and Somerset. Friendly doors were
opened to us by those natives whose houses
formed part of the arena, and it was amusing to
see the toreadors popping in and out of them,
like the little man and woman on the barometer
who come out when it rains and go in when the
sun shines, and vice versa.

On those frequent occasions when the bull
charged the barricade, the entire Ime of men and
boys on its topmost rail would go over backward,
and disappear completely until the disappointed
bull had charged madly off in another direction.
Once he knocked half of a mud-house away in
his efforts to follow a man through a doorway,
and again a window-sill, over which a toreador
had dived head first like a harlequin in a panto-
mime, caved in under the force of his attack.
Fresh bulls followed the first, and the boy musi-
cians maddened them still further by the most
hideous noises, which only ceased when the bulls
charged the fence upon which the musicians sat,
and which they vacated precipitately, each tak-
ing up the tune where he had left off when his
feet struck the ground. There was a grand ball
that night, to which we did not go, but we lay
awake listening to the fifteen boy musicians
until two in the morning. It was an odd, eyrie
sort of music, in which the pipings of the reed
instruments predominated. But it was very
beautiful, and very much like the music of the

IN HONDURAS 1 19

Hungarian gypsies in making little thrills chase
up and down over one's nervous system.

The next morning Jeffs had shaken off his
fever, and, once more reunited, we trotted on
over heavily wooded hills, where we found no
water until late in the afternoon, when we came
upon a broad stream, and surprised a number of
young girls in bathing, who retreated leisurely as
we came clattering down to the ford. Bathing
in mid-stream is a popular amusement in Hon-
duras, and is conducted without any false sense
of modesty ; and judging from the number of
times we came upon women so engaged, it seems
to be the chief occupation of their day.

That night we slept in Comyagua, the second
largest city in the republic. It was originally
selected as the site for a capital, and situated
accordingly at exactly even distances from the
Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. We found
it a dull and desolate place of many one-story
houses, with iron-barred windows, and a great,
bare, dusty plaza, faced by a huge cathedral.
Commerce seemed to have passed it by, and
the sixty thousand inhabitants who occupied it
in the days of the Spaniards have dwindled down
to ten. The place is as completely cut off from
civilization as an island in the Pacific Ocean.
The plain upon which Comyagua stands stretches
for many miles, and the nature of the stones and
pebbles on its surface would seem to show that

120 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

it was once the bottom of a great lake. Now its
round pebbles and sandy soil make it a valley
of burning heat, into which the sun beats with-
out the intervening shadows of trees or moun-
tains to save the traveller from the fierceness of
its rays.

We rode over thirty miles of it, and found that
part of the plain which we traversed after our
night's rest at the capital the most trying ten
miles of our trip. We rode out into it in the
rear of a long funeral procession, in which the
men and boys walked bareheaded and barefooted
in the burning sand. They were marching to a
burial-ground out in the plain, and they were
carrying the coffin on their shoulders, and bear-
ing before it a life-sized figure of the Virgin and
many flaring candles that burned yellow in the
glaring sunlight.

From Comyagua the trail led for many miles
through heavy sand, in which nothing seemed to
grow but gigantic cacti of a sickly light green
that twisted themselves in jointed angles fifteen
to twenty feet in the air above us, and century-
plants with flowers of a vivid yellow, and tall,
leafless bushes bristling with thorns. The moun-
tains lay on cither side, and formed the valley
through which we rode, two dark-green barriers
against a blazing sky, but for miles before and
behind us there was nothing to rest the eye from
the glare of the sand. The atmosphere was

IN HONDURAS 121

without a particle of moisture, and the trail
quivered and swam in the heat ; if you placed
your hand on the leather pommel of your saddle
it burned the flesh like a plate of hot brass, and
ten minutes after we had dipped our helmets in
water they were baked as dry as when they had
first come from the shop. The rays of the sun
seemed to beat up at you from below as well
as from above, and we gasped and panted as we
rode, dodging and ducking our heads as though
the sun was something alive and active that
struck at us as we passed by. If you dared to
look up at the sky its brilliancy blinded you as
though some one had flashed a mirror in your
eyes.

We lunched at a village of ten huts planted
defiantly in the open plain, and as little protect-
ed from the sun as a row of bricks in a brick-
yard, but by lying between two of them we found
a draught of hot air and shade, and so rested for
an hour. Our trail after that led over a mile or
two of red hematite ore, which suggested a ride
in a rolling-mill with the roof taken away, and
with the sun beating into the four walls, and the
air filled with iron-dust. Two hours later we
came to a cafton of white chalk, in which the
government had cut stepping-places for the hoofs
of the mules. The white glare in this valley was
absolutely blinding, and the atmosphere was that
of a lime-kiln. We showed several colors after

122 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

this ride, with layers of sand and clay, and parti-
cles of red ore and powdering of white chalk over
all ; but by five o'clock we reached the moun-
tains once more, and found a cool stream dash-
ing into little water-falls and shaded by great
trees, where the air was scented by the odor of
pine-needles and the damp, spongy breath of
moss and fern.

We were now within two days of Tegucigal-
pa, and the sense of nearness to civilization and
the knowledge that the greater part of our jour-
ney was at an end made us forget the discom-
forts and hardships which we had endured with-
out the consolation of excitement that comes
with danger, or the comforting thought that we
were accomplishing anything in the meantime.
We had been complaining of this during the
day to Jeffs, and saying that had we gone to the
coast of East Africa we could not have been
more uncomfortable nor run greater risks from
fever, but that there we would have met with
big game, and we would have visited the most
picturesque instead of the least interesting of all
countries.

These complaints inspired Jeffs to play a trick
upon us, which was meant in a kindly spirit, and
by which he intended to furnish us with a mo-
ment's excitement, and to make us believe that
we had been in touch with danger. There are
occasional brigands in Central America, and their

IN HONDURAS 125

favorite hunting-ground in Honduras is within a
few miles of Tegucigalpa, along the trail from
the eastern coast over which we were then pass-
ing. We had been warned of these men, and it
occurred to Jeffs that as we complained of lack of
excitement in our trip, it would be a thoughtful
kindness to turn brigand and hold us up upon
our march. So he left us still bathing at the
water-fall, and telling us that he would push on
to engage quarters for the night, rode some dis-
tance ahead and secreted himself behind a huge
rock on one side of a narrow caflon. He first
placed his coat on a bush beside him, and his
hat on another bush, so as to make it appear
that there were several men with him. His idea
was that when he challenged us we would see
the dim figures in the moonlight and remember
the brigands, and that we were in their stalking-
ground, and get out of their clutches as quickly
as possible, well satisfied that we had at last met
with a real adventure.

We reached his ambuscade about seven. Som-
erset was riding in advance, reciting " The Wal-
rus and the Carpenter," while we were correcting
him when he went wrong, and gazing unconcern-
edly and happily at the cool moonlight as it
came through the trees, when we were suddenly
startled by a yell and an order to halt, in Span-
ish, and a rapid fusillade of pistol-shots. We
could distinguish nothing but what was appar-

126 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

ently the figures of three men crouching on the
hill-side and the flashes of their revolvers, so we
all fell off our mules and began banging away at
them with our rifles, while the mules scampered
off down the mountain. This was not as Jeffs
had planned it. and he had to rearrange matters
very rapidly. Bullets were cutting away twigs
all over the hill-side and splashing on the rock
behind which he was now lying, and though he
might have known we could not hit him, he was
afraid of a stray bullet. So he yelled at us in
English, and called us by name, until we finally
discovered we had been grossly deceived and im-
posed upon, and that our adventure was a very
unsatisfactory practical joke for all concerned. It
took us a long time to round up the mules, and
we reached our sleeping- place in grim silence,
and with our desire for danger still unsatisfied.

The last leagues that separated us the next
morning from Tegucigalpa seemed, of course,
the longest in the entire journey. And so great
was our desire to reach the capital before night-
fall that we left the broader trail and scrambled
down the side of the last mountain, dragging our
mules after us, and slipping and sliding in dust and
rolling stones to the tops of our boots. The city
did not look inviting as we viewed it from above.
It lay in a bare, dreary plain, surrounded by five
hills that rose straight into the air, and that
seemed to have been placed there for the special

1 \

IN HONDURAS

129

purpose of revolutionists, in order that they
might the more exactly drop shot into the town
at their feet. The hills were bare of verdure,
and the landscape about the capital made each

^ -'

THE BANK OF HONDURAS

of us think of the country about Jerusalem. As
none of us had ever seen Jerusalem, we foregath-
ered and argued why this should be so, and de-
cided that it was on account of the round rocks
lying apart from one another, and low, bushy
trees, and the red soil, and the flat roofs of the
houses.

The telegraph wire which extends across Hon-
duras, swinging from trees and piercing long
9

130 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

stretches of palm and jungle, had warned the
foreign residents of the coming of Jeffs, and
some of them rode out to make us welcome.
Their greeting, and the sight of paved streets,
and the passing of a band of music and a guard
of soldiers in shoes and real uniform, seemed to
promise much entertainment and possible com-
fort. But the hotel was a rude shock. We had
sent word that we were coming, and we had
looked forward eagerly to our first night in a
level bed under clean linen; but when we arrived
we were offered the choice of a room just vacat-
ed by a very ill man, who had left all of his med-
icines behind him, so that the place was unpleas-
antly suggestive of a hospital, or a very small
room, in which there were three cots, and a lay-
er of dirt over all so thick that I wrote my name
with the finger of my riding-glove on the centre-
table. The son of the proprietor saw this, and,
being a kindly person and well disposed, dipped
his arm in water and proceeded to rub it over
the top of the table, using his sleeve as a wash-
rag. So after that we gave up expecting any-
thing pleasant, and were in consequence delight-
fully surprised when we came upon anything
that savored of civilization.

Tegucigalpa has an annex which lies on the
opposite side of the river, and which is to the
capital what Brooklyn is to New York. The
river is not very wide nor very deep, and its

IN HONDURAS 131

course is impeded by broad, flat rocks. The
washer -women of the two towns stand beside
these all day knee-deep in the eddies and beat
the stones with their twisted clubs of linen, so
that their echo sounds above the roar of the
river like the banging of shutters in the wind or
the reports of pistols. This is the only sugges-
tion of energy that the town furnishes. The oth-
er inhabitants seem surfeited with leisure and ir-
ritable with boredom. There are long, dark, cool
shops- of general merchandise, and a great cathe-
dral and a pretty plaza, where the band plays at
night and people circle in two rings, one going
to the right and one going to the left, and there
is the government palace and a big penitentiary,
a university and a cemetery. But there is no
color nor ornamentation nor light nor life nor
bustle nor laughter. You do not hear people
talking and calling to one another across the
narrow streets of the place by day or serenading
by night. Every one seems to go to bed at nine
o'clock, and after that hour the city is as silent
as its great graveyard, except when the boy po-
licemen mark the hour with their whistles or the
street dogs meet to fight.

The most interesting thing about the capital
is the fact to which I have already alluded, that
everything in it and pertaining to it that was
not dug from the ground or fashioned from
trees was carried to it on the backs of mules.

132

THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

The letter-boxes on the street corners had once
been United States letter-boxes, and had later
swung across the backs of donkeys. The gas-
lamps and the iron railings of the parks, the few
statues and busts in the public places, reached

STATUE OF MOKA/.AN

Tegucigalpa by the same means, and the great
equestrian statue of Morazan the Liberator, in
the plaza, was cast in Italy, and had been
brought to Tegucigalpa in pieces before it was
put together like a puzzle and placed in its pres-
ent position to mark a glorious and victorious

IN HONDURAS 133

immortality. These things were not interesting
in themselves, but it was interesting that they
were there at all.

On the second day after our arrival the vice-
president, Luis Bonilla, who bears the same last
name but is no near relation to President Bonil-
la, took the oath of office, and we saw the cere-
mony with the barefooted public in the recep-
tion - room of the palace. The hall was hung
with lace curtains and papered with imitation
marble, and the walls were decorated with cray-
on portraits of Honduranian presidents. Bogran
was not among them, nor was Morazan. The
former was missing because it was due to him
that young Bonilla had been counted out when
he first ran for the presidency three years ago,
when he was thirty-three years old, and the por-
trait of the Liberator was being reframed, be-
cause Bonilla's followers six months before had
unintentionally shot holes through it when they
were besieging the capital. The ceremony of
swearing in the vice-president did not last long,
and what impressed us most about it was the
youth of the members of the cabinet and of the
Supreme Court who delivered the oath of office.
They belonged distinctly to the politician class
as one sees it at home, and were young men of
eloquent speech and elegant manners, in frock-
coats and white ties. We came to know most of
the president's followers later, and found them

134 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

hospitable to a degree, although they seemed
hardly old enough or serious enough to hold
place in the government of a republic, even so
small a one as Honduras. What was most ad-
mirable about each of them was that he had
fought and bled to obtain the office he held.
That is hardly a better reason for giving out
clerkships and cabinet portfolios than the rea-
sons which obtain with us for distributing the
spoils of office, but you cannot help feeling more
respect for the man who has marched by the side
of his leader through swamps and through jungle,
who has starved on rice, who has slept in the
bushes, and fought with a musket in his hand in
open places, than for the fat and sleek gentlemen
who keep open bar at the headquarters of their
party organization, who organize marching clubs,
and who by promises or by cash secure a certain
amount of influence and a certain number of votes.
They risk nothing but their money, and if their
man fails to get in, their money is all they lose ;
but the Central American politician has to show
the faith that is in him by going out on the
mountain-side and hacking his way to office with
a naked machete in his hand, and if his leader
fails, he loses his life, with his back to a church
wall, and looking into the eyes of a firing squad,
or he digs his own grave by the side of the road,
and stands at one end of it, covered with clay
and sweat, and with the fear of death upon him,

IN HONDURAS 137

and takes his last look at the hot sun and the
palms and the blue mountains, with the buzzards
wheeling about him, and then shuts his eyes, and
is toppled over into the grave, with a half-dozen
bullets in his chest and stomach. That is what
I should like to see happen to about half of our
professional politicians at home. Then the other
half might understand that holding a public of-
fice is a very serious business, and is not merely
meant to furnish them with a livelihood and with
places for their wives' relations.

I saw several churches and cathedrals in Hon-
duras with a row of bullet-holes in the front wall,
about as high from the ground as a man's chest,
and an open grave by the road-side, which had
been dug by the man who was to have occupied it.
The sight gave us a vivid impression of the un-
certainties of government in Central America.
The man who dug this particular grave had been
captured, with two companions, while they were
hastening to rejoin their friends of the govern-
ment party. His companions in misery were
faint-hearted creatures, and thought it mattered
but little, so long as they had to die, in what
fashion they were buried. So they scooped out
a few feet of earth with the tools their captors
gave them, and stood up in the hollows they had
made, and were shot back into them, dead ; but
the third man declared that he was not going to
let his body lie so near the surface of the earth

138 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

that the mules could kick his bones and the
next heavy freshet wash them away. He ac-
cordingly dug leisurely and carefully to the depth
of six feet, smoothing the sides and sharpening
the corners, and while he was thus engaged at

GENERAL LOUIS HOGRAN, EX-PRESIDENT

the bottom of the hole he heard yells and shots
above him, and when he poked his head up over
the edge of the grave he saw his own troops run-
ning down the mountain-side, and his enemies
disappearing before them. He is still alive, and

IN HONDURAS 139

frequently rides by the hole in the road-side on
his way to the capital. The story illustrates the
advisability of doing what every one has to do
in this world, even up to the very last minute,
in a thorough and painstaking manner.

There do not seem to be very many men killed
in these revolutions, but the ruin they bring to
the country while they last, and which continues
after they are over, while the " outs " are getting
up another revolution, is so serious that any sort
of continued prosperity or progress is impossible.
Native merchants will not order goods that may
never reach them, and neither do the gringos
care to make contracts with men who in six
months may not only be out of office, but out of
the country as well. Sometimes a revolution
takes place, and half of the people of the coun-
try will not know of it until it has been put
down or has succeeded ; and again the revolu-
tion may spread to every boundary, and all the
men at work on the high-roads and in the mines
or on the plantations must stop work and turn
to soldiering, and pack-mules are seized, the mail-
carriers stopped, plantations are devastated, and
forced loans are imposed upon those who live in
cities, so that every one suffers more or less
through every change of executive. During the
last revolution Tegucigalpa was besieged for six
months, and was not captured until most of the
public buildings had been torn open by cannon

140 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

from the hills around the town, and the dwell-
ing-houses still show where bullets marked the
mud and plaster of the walls or buried them-
selves in the wood-work. The dining-room of
our hotel was ventilated by such openings, and
we used to amuse ourselves by tracing the course
of the bullets from the hole they had made at
one side of the room to their resting-place in the
other. The native Honduranian is not energetic,
and, except in the palace, there has been but
little effort made by the victors to cover up the
traces of their bombardment. Every one we met
had a different experience to relate, and pointed
out where he was sitting when a particular hole
appeared in the plaster before him, or at which
street corner a shell fell and burst at his feet.

It follows, of course, that a government which
is created by force of arms, and which holds it-
self in place by the same power of authority, can-
not be a very just or a very liberal one, even if
its members are honest, and the choice of a ma-
jority of the people, and properly in office in
spite of the fact that they fought to get there,
and not on account of it. Honilla was undoubt-
edly at one time elected President of Honduras,
although he did not gain the presidential chair
until after he had thrown his country into war
and had invaded it at the head of troops from
the rival republic of Nicaragua.

The Central-American cannot understand that

IN HONDURAS 143

when a bad man is elected to office legally it is
better in the long-run that he should serve out
his full term than that a better man should drive
him out and defy the constitution. If he could
be brought to comprehend that when the consti-
tution says the president must serve four years
that means four years, and not merely until some
one is strong enough to overthrow him, it might
make him more careful as to whom he elected
to office in the first place. But the value of
stability in government is something they can-
not be made to understand. It is not in their
power to see it, and the desire for change and
revolution is born in the blood. They speak of
a man as a " good revolutionist " just as we
would speak of some one being a good pianist,
or a good shot, or a good executive officer. It
is a recognized calling, and the children grow up
into fighters ; and even those who have lived
abroad, and who should have learned better,
begin to plot and scheme as soon as they return
to their old environment.

In each company of soldiers in Honduras
there are two or three little boys in uniform
who act as couriers and messengers, and who
are able, on account of their slight figure, to
penetrate where a man would be seen and shot.
One of the officers in the revolution of 1894
told me he had sent six of these boys, one after
another, with despatches across an open plain

144 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

which was being raked by the rifles of the ene-
my. And as each boy was killed as he crawled
through the sage-brush the other boys begged of
their colonel to let them be the next to go,
jumping up and down around him and snapping
their fingers like school -boys who want to at-
tract the attention of their teacher.

In the same revolution a young man of great
promise and many acquirements, who had just
returned from the States with two degrees from
Columbia College, and who should have lived to
turn his education to account in his own coun-
try, was killed with a rifle in his hand the third
day after his arrival from New York. In that
city he would probably have submitted cheerful-
ly to any imposition of the law, and would have
taken it quite as a matter of course had he been
arrested for playing golf on Sunday, or for riding
a bicycle at night without a lamp ; but as soon
as this graduate of Columbia smelled the pow-
der floating on his native air he loaded a rifle,
and sat out all day on the porch of his house
taking chance shots at the revolutionists on the
hill-side, until a chance shot ended him and his
brilliant career forever. The pity of it is that so
much good energy should be wasted in obtain-
ing such poor results, for nothing better ever
seems to follow these revolutions. There is
only a new form of dictatorship, which varies
only in the extent of its revenge and in the pun-

IN HONDURAS 145

ishments it metes out to its late opponents, but
which must be, if it hopes to remain in power, a
dictatorship and an autocracy.

The republics of Central America are repub-
lics in name only, and the movements of a

MORAZAN, THE LIBERATOR OF HONDURAS

stranger within the boundaries of Honduras are
as closely watched as though he were a news-
paper correspondent in Siberia. I often had to
sign the names of our party twice in one day for
the benefit of police and customs officers, and

146 THRKE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

we never entered a hotel or boarded a steamer
or disembarked from one that we were not care-
fully checked and receipted for exactly as though
we were boxes of merchandise or registered let-
ters. Even the natives cannot walk the street
after nightfall without being challenged by sen-
tries, and the collection of letters we received
from alcaldes and comandantes and governors
and presidents certifying to our being reputable
citizens is large enough to paper the side of a
wall. The only time in Central America when
our privacy was absolutely unmolested, and
when we felt as free to walk abroad as though
we were on the streets of New York, was when
we were under the protection of the hated mo-
narchical institution of Great Britain at Belize,
but never when we were in any of these disor-
ganized military camps called free republics.

The Central -American citizen is no more fit
for a republican form of government than he is
for an arctic expedition, and what he needs is to
have a protectorate established over him, either
by the United States or by another power; it
does not matter which, so long as it leaves the
Nicaragua Canal in our hands. In the capital
of Costa Rica there is a statue of the Republic
in the form of a young woman standing with her
foot on the neck of General Walker, the Ameri-
can filibuster. We had planned to go to the
capital for the express purpose of tearing that

IN HONDURAS 147

statue down some night, or blowing it up ; so it
is perhaps just as well for us that we could not
get there ; but it would have been a very good
thing for Costa Rica if Walker, or any other
man of force, had put his foot on the neck of
every republic in Central America and turned it
to some account.

Away from the coasts, where there is fever,
Central Arrierica is a wonderful country, rich
and beautiful, and burdened with plenty, but its
people make it a nuisance and an affront to
other nations, and its parcel of independent lit-
tle states, with the pomp of power and none of
its dignity, are and will continue to be a con-
stant danger to the peace which should exist be-
tween two great powers.

There is no more interesting question of the
present day than that of what is to be done with
the world's land which is lying unimproved ;
whether it shall go to the great power that is
willing to turn it to account, or remain with its
original owner, who fails to understand its value.
The Central-Americans are like a gang of semi-
barbarians in a beautifully furnished house, of
which they can understand neither its possibili-
ties of comfort nor its use. They are the dogs
in the manger among nations. Nature has given
to their country great pasture -lands, wonderful
forests of rare woods and fruits, treasures of silver
and gold and iron, and soil rich enough to sup-

148 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

ply the world with coffee, and it only waits for
an honest effort to make it the natural highway
of traffic from every portion of the globe. The
lakes of Nicaragua are ready to furnish a pas-
sageway which should save two months of sail-
ing around the Horn, and only forty-eight miles of
swamp-land at Panama separate the two greatest
bodies of water on the earth's surface. Nature
has done so much that there is little left for man
to do, but it will have to be some other man than
a native-born Central-American who is to do it.

We had our private audience with President
Bonilla in time, and found him a most courteous
and interesting young man. He is only thirty-
six years of age, which probably makes him the
youngest president in the world, and he carries
on his watch-chain a bullet which was cut out of
his arm during the last revolution. He showed
us over the palace, and pointed out where he
had shot holes in it, and entertained us most
hospitably. The other members of the cabinet
were equally kind, making us many presents, and
offering Griscom a consul -generalship abroad,
and consulates to Somerset and myself, but we
said we would be ambassadors or nothing ; so
they offered to make us generals in the next
revolution, and we accepted that responsible
position with alacrity, knowing that not even the
regiments to which we were accredited could
force us again into Honduras.

IN HONDURAS 149

Before we departed the president paid us a
very doubtful compliment in asking us to ride
with him. We supposed it was well meant, but
we still have secret misgivings that it was a plot
to rid himself of us and of the vice-president at
the same time. When his secretary came to
tell us that Dr. Bonilla would be glad to have us
ride with him at five that afternoon, I recalled
the fact that all the horses I had seen in Hon-
duras were but little larger than an ordinary
donkey, and quite as depressed and spiritless.
So I accepted with alacrity. The other two
men, being cross-country riders, and entitled to
wear the gold buttons of various hunt clubs on
their waistcoats, accepted as a matter of course.
But when we reached the palace we saw seven
or eight horses in the patio, none under sixteen
hands high, and each engaged in dragging two
or three grooms about the yard, and swinging
them clear of the brick tiles as easily as a sailor
swings a lead. The president explained to us
that these were a choice lot of six stallions which
he had just imported from Chili, and that three
of them had never worn a saddle before that
morning.

He gave one of these to Griscom and another
one to the vice-president, for reasons best known
to himself, and the third to Somerset. Gris-
com's animal had an idea that it was better to
go backward like a crab than to advance, so he

150 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

backed in circles around the courtyard, while
Somerset's horse seemed best to enjoy rearing
himself on his hind-legs, with the idea of rubbing
Somerset off against the wall ; and the vice-
president's horse did everything that a horse can
do, and a great many things that I should not
have supposed a horse could do, had I not seen
it. I put my beast's nose into a corner of the
wall where he could not witness the circus per-
formance going on behind him, and I watched
the president's brute turning round and round
and round until it made me dizzy. We stran-
gers confessed later that we were all thinking of
exactly the same thing, which was that, no mat-
ter how many of our bones were shattered, we
must not let these natives think they could ride
any better than any chance American or Eng-
lishman, and it was only a matter of national
pride that kept us in our saddles. The vice-
president's horse finally threw him into the door-
way and rolled on him, and it required five of
his officers to pull the horse away and set him
on his feet again. The vice- president had not
left his saddle for an instant, and if he han-
dles his men in the field as he handled that
horse, it is not surprising that he wins many
battles.

Not wishing to have us all killed, and seeing
that it was useless to attempt to kill the vice-
president in that way, Dr, Bonilla sent word to

IN HONDURAS 151

the band to omit their customary salute, and so
we passed out in grateful silence between breath-
less rows of soldiers and musicians and several
hundreds of people who had never seen a life-
sized horse before. We rode at a slow pace, on
account of the vice-president's bruises, while the
president pointed out the different points from
which he had attacked the capital. He was not
accompanied by any guard on this ride, and in-
formed us that he was the first president who
had dared go abroad without one. He seemed
to trust rather to the good-will of the pueblo, to
whom he plays, and to whom he bowed much
more frequently than to the people of the richer
class. It was amusing to see the more prominent
men of the place raise their hats to the president,
and the young girls in the suburbs nodding casu-
ally and without embarrassment to the man. Be-
fore he set out on his ride he stuck a gold-plated
revolver in his hip-pocket, which was to take the
place of the guard of honor of former presidents,
and to protect him in case of an attempt at as-
sassination. It suggested that there are other
heads besides those that wear a crown which rest
uneasy.

It was a nervous ride, and Griscom's horse
added to the excitement by trying to back him
over a precipice, and he was only saved from
going down one thousand yards to the roofs of
the city below by several of the others dragging

152 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

at the horse's bridle. When, after an hour, we
found ourselves once more within sight of the
palace, we covertly smiled at one another, and
are now content never to associate with presi-
dents again unless we walk.

We left Tegucigalpa a few days later with a
generous escort, including all the consuls, and
Jose1 Guiteris, the assistant secretary of state, and
nearly all of the foreign residents. We made
such a formidable showing as we raced through
the streets that it suggested an uprising, and we
cried, " Viva Guiteris !" to make the people think
there was a new revolution in his favor. We
shouted with the most loyal enthusiasm, but it
only served to make Guiteris extremely unhappy,
and he occupied himself in considering how he
could best explain to Bonilla that the demonstra-
tion was merely an expression of our idea of
humor. Twelve miles out we all stopped and
backed the mules up side by side, and every-
body shook hands with everybody else, and there
were many promises to write, and to forward all
manner of things, and assurances of eternal re-
membrance and friendship, and then the Guite-
ris revolutionists galloped back, firing parting
salutes with their revolvers, and we fell into line
again with a nod of satisfaction at being once
more on the road.*

* Guiteris died a few months after our visit

IN HONDURAS 153

We never expected any conveniences or com-
forts on the road, and so we were never disap-
pointed, and were much happier and more content-
ed in consequence than at the capital, where the
name promised so much and the place furnished
so little. We found that it was not the luxuries
of life that we sighed after, but the mere con-
veniences— those things to which we had become
so much accustomed that we never supposed there
were places where they did not exist. A chair
with a back, for example, was one of the things
we most wanted. We had never imagined, until
we went to Honduras, that chairs grew without
backs ; but after we had ridden ten hours, and
were so tired that each man found himself easing
his spinal column by leaning forward with his
hands on the pommel of his saddle, we wanted
something more than a three-legged stool when
we alighted for the night.

Our ride to the Pacific coast was a repetition of
the ride to the capital, except that, as there was
a full moon, we slept in the middle of the day
and rode later in the night. During this nocturnal
journey we met many pilgrims going to the
festivals. They were all mounted on mules, and
seemed a very merry and jovial company. Some-
times there were as many as fifty in one party,
and we came across them picnicking in the shade
by day, or jogging along in the moonlight in a
cloud of white dust, or a cloud of white foam as

154 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

they forded the broad river and their donkeys
splashed and slipped in the rapids. The nights
were very beautiful and cool, and the silence un-
der the clear blue sky and white stars was like
the silence of the plains. The moon turned
the trail a pale white, and made the trees on
either side of it alive with shadows that seemed
to play hide-and-seek with us, and the stumps
and rocks moved and gesticulated with life,
until we drew up even with them, when they
were transformed once more into wood and
stone.

It was on the third day out from the capital,
while we were picking our way down the side of
a mountain, that Jeffs pointed to what looked
like a lake of silver lying between two great hills,
and we knew that we had crossed the continent,
and so raised our hats and saluted the Pacific
Ocean. A day later, after a long, rapid ride over
a level plain where the trail was so broad that we
could ride four abreast, we came to San Lorenzo,
a little cluster of huts at the edge of the ocean.
The settlement was still awake, for a mule train
of silver had just arrived from the San Rosario
mines, and the ruddy glare of pine knots was
flashing through the chinks in the bamboo walls
of the huts, and making yellow splashes of color
in the soft white light of the moon. We swung
ourselves out of the saddles for the last time, and
gave the little mules a farewell pat and many

ON THE WAY TO CORINTO

IN HONDURAS 157

thanks, to which they made no response whatso-
ever.

Five hours later we left the continent for the
island of Amapala, the chief seaport of the Pa-
cific side of Honduras, and our ride was at an end.
We left San Lorenzo at two in the morning, but
we did not reach Amapala, although it was but
fifteen miles out to sea, until four the next after-
noon. We were passengers in a long, open boat,
and slept stretched on our blankets at the bot-
tom, while four natives pulled at long sweeps.
There were eight cross-seats, and a man sat on
every other one. A log of wood in which steps
had been cut was bound to each empty seat, and
it was up this that the rower walked, as though
he meant to stand up on the seat to which it was
tied, but he would always change his mind and
sink back again, bracing his left leg on the seat
and his right leg on the log, and dragging the
oar through the water with the weight of his body
as he sank backwards. I lay on the ribs of the
boat below them and watched them through the
night, rising and falling with a slight toss of the
head as they sank back, and with their brown
naked bodies outlined against the sky-line. They
were so silent and their movements so regular
that they seemed like statues cut in bronze. By
ten the next morning they became so far animat-
ed as to say that they were tired and hungry,
and would we allow them to rest on a little isl-

158 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

and that lay half a mile off our bow ? We were
very glad to rest ourselves, and to get out of the
sun and the glare of the sea, and to stretch our
cramped limbs: so we beached the boat in a little
bay, and frightened off thousands of gulls, which
rose screaming in the air, and which were appar-
ently the only inhabitants.

The galley-slaves took sticks of driftwood and
scattered over the rocks, turning back the sea-
weed with their hands, and hacking at the base
of the rocks with their improvised hammers. We
found that they were foraging for oysters ; and as
we had nothing but a tin of sardines and two bis-
cuits among five of us, and had had nothing to eat
for twenty-four hours, we followed their example,
and chipped the oysters off with the butts of our
revolvers, and found them cool and coppery, like
English oysters, and most refreshing. It was
such a lonely little island that we could quite im-
agine we were cast away upon it, and began to
play we were Robinson Crusoe, and took off our
boots and went in wading, paddling around in the
water after mussels and crabs until we were chased
to shore by a huge shark. Then eveiy one went
to sleep in the sand until late in the afternoon,
when a breeze sprang up, and a boatman carried
us out on his shoulders, and we dashed off gayly
under full sail to the isle of Amapala, where we
bade good-bye to Colonel Jeffs and to the Repub-
lic of Honduras.

IN HONDURAS 159

We had crossed the continent at a point
where it was but little broader than the distance
from Boston to New York, a trip of five hours
by train, but which had taken us twenty- two
days.

AT CORINTO

|VERY now and again each of us,
either through his own choice or by
force of circumstance, drops out of
step with the rest of the world, and
retires from it into the isolation of a sick-room,
or to the loneliness of the deck of an ocean
steamer, and for some short time the world some-
how manages to roll on without him.

He is like a man who falls out of line in a reg-
iment to fasten his shoelace or to fill his can-
teen, and who hears over his shoulder the hurry-
ing tramp of his comrades, who are leaving him
farther and farther behind, so that he has to run
briskly before he can catch up with them and
take his proper place once more in the proces-
sion.

I shall always consider the ten days we spent
at Corinto, on the Pacific side of Nicaragua,
while we waited for the steamer to take us south
to Panama, as so many days of non-existence,

AT CORINTO l6l

as so much time given to the mere exercise of
living, when we were no more of this world than
are the prisoners in the salt-mines of Siberia, or
the keepers of light-houses scattered over sunny
seas, or the men who tend toll-gates on empty
country lanes. And so when I read in the news-
papers last fall that three British ships of war
were anchored in the harbor of Corinto, with
their guns loaded to the muzzles with ultima-
tums and no one knows what else besides, and
that they meant to levy on the customs dues of
that sunny little village, it was as much of a shock
to me as it would be to the inhabitants of Sleepy
Hollow were they told that that particular spot
was wanted as a site for a World's Fair.

For no ships of any sort, certainly no ships of
war, ever came to Corinto while we occupied the
only balcony of its only hotel. Indeed, that was
why we were there, and had they come we would
have gone with them, no matter to what port
they were bound, even to the uttermost parts of
the earth.

We had come to Corinto from the little island
of Amapala, which lies seventy-five miles farther
up the coast, and which guards the only port
of entry to Honduras on the Pacific seaboard.
It is supposed to belong to the Republic of Hon-
duras, but it is in reality the property of Rossner
Brothers, who sell everything from German ma-
chetes to German music-boxes, and who could,

162

THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

PRINCIPAL HOTEL AND PRINCIPAL HOUSK AT CORINTO

if they wanted it, purchase the entire Republic
of Honduras in the morning, and make a pres-
ent of it to the Kaiser in the course of the after-
noon. You have only to change the name of
Rossner Brothers to the San Rosario Mining
Company, to the Pacific Mail, to Errman Broth-
ers, to the Panama Railroad Company, and you
will identify the actual rulers of one or of sev-
eral of the republics of Central America.

It is very well for President Zelaya, or Barrios,
or Vasquez, or whatever his name may happen
to be this month, to write to the New York

AT COR INTO 163

Herald and tell the people of the United States
what the revolution in his country means. It
does no harm ; no one in the United States
reads the letter, except the foreign editor who
translates it, and no one in his own country ever
sees it, but it makes him happy in thinking he is
persuading some one that he governs in his own
way. As a matter of fact he does not. His
country, no matter what her name may be, is
ruled by a firm of coffee-merchants in New York
city, or by a German railroad company, or by a
line of coasting steamers, or by a great trading-
house, with headquarters in Berlin or London or
Bordeaux. If the president wants money he bor-
rows it from the trading-house ; if he wants arms,
or his soldiers need blankets, the trading-house
supplies them. No one remembers now who was
President of Peru when Henry Meiggs was alive,
and to-day William L. Grace is a better name on
letters of introduction to Chili and Peru than that
of a secretary of state.

When we were in Nicaragua, one little English
banking-house was fighting the minister of
finance and the minister of foreign affairs and
the president and the entire government, and
while the notes issued by the bank were accepted
at their face value, those of the government were
taken only in the presence of a policeman or a sol-
dier, who was there to see that you did take them.
You find this condition of affairs all through

164 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

Central America, and you are not long in a re-
public before you learn which merchant or which
bank or which railroad company controls it, and
you soon grow to look upon a mule loaded with
boxes bearing the trade-mark of a certain busi-
ness-house with more respect than upon a sol-
dier who wears the linen ribbon of the govern-
ment. For you know that at a word the soldier
will tear the ribbon from his straw sombrero and
replace it with another upon which is printed
" Viva Dr. Somebody Else," while the trade-
mark of the business - house will continue as
long as English and German merchandise is car-
ried across the sea in ships. And it will also
continue as long as Great Britain and Germany
and the United States are represented by con-
suls and consular agents who are at the same
time the partners of the leading business firms
in the seaport over which their consular juris-
diction extends. For few Central-American re-
publics are going to take away a consul's exe-
quatur as long as they owe him in his unofficial
capacity for a large loan of money ; and the
merchant, on the other hand, knows that he is
not going to suffer from the imposition of a
forced loan, nor see his mules seized, as long as
the tin sign with the American eagle screaming
upon it is tacked above the brass business plate
of his warehouse.

There was a merchant in Tegucigalpa named

AT CORINTO 165

Santos Soto — he is there still, I believe — and
about a year ago President Vasquez told him he
needed a loan of ten thousand dollars to assist
him in his struggle against Bonilla ; and as Soto
was making sixty thousand dollars a year in the
country, he suggested that he had better lend it
promptly. Soto refused, and was locked in the
cartel, where it was explained to him that for
every day he delayed in giving the money the
amount demanded of him would be increased
one thousand dollars. As he still refused, he
was chained to an iron ball and led out to sweep
the streets in front of his shop, which extends
on both sides of the principal thoroughfare of
the capital. He is an old man, and the sight of
the chief merchant in Tegucigalpa sweeping up
the dust in front of his own block of stores had
a most salutary effect upon the other merchants,
who promptly loaned the sums demanded of
them, taking rebates on customs dues in ex-
change— with one exception. This merchant
owned a jewelry store, and was at the same
time the English consular agent. He did not
sweep the streets, nor did he contribute to the
forced loan. He values in consequence his tin
sign, which is not worth much as a work of art,
at about ten thousand dollars.

There is much that might be written of con-
sular agents in Central America that would dif-
fer widely from the reports written by them-

1 66 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

selves and published by the State Department.
The most interesting thing about them, to my
mind, is the fact that none of them ever seem to
represent a country which they have ever seen,
and that they are always citizens of another
country to which they are anxious to return. I
find that after Americans, Germans make the best
American consular agents, and Englishmen the
best German consular agents, while French con-
sular agents would be more useful to their coun-
trymen if they could speak French as well as
they do Spanish. Sometimes, as in the case of
the consular agent at Corinto, you find a native
of Italy representing both Great Britain and the
United States. A whole comic opera could be
written on the difficulties of a Nicaraguan act-
ing as an English and American consul, with
three British men-of-war in the harbor levying
on the customs dues of his native land, and an
American squadron hastening from Panama to
see that their English cousins did not gather in
a few islands by mistake.

If he called on the British admiral, and re-
ceived his seven -gun salute, would it constitute
a breach of international etiquette if he were
rowed over to the American admiral and received
seven guns from him ; and as a native of Nicara-
gua could he see the customs dues, which com-
prise the government's chief source of revenue,
going into the pockets of one country which he

AT CORINTO 167

so proudly serves without complaining to the
other country which he serves with equal satis-
faction ? Every now and then you come across
a real American consul who was born in Ameri-
ca, and who serves the United States with abil-
ity, dignity, and self-respect, so that you are glad
you are both Americans. Of this class we found
General Allen Thomas at La Guayra, who was
later promoted and made United States minister
at Caracas, Mr. Alger at Puerto Cortez, Mr. Little
at Tegucigalpa, and Colonel Bird at Caracas.

We found that the firm of Rossner Brothers
had in their employ the American and English
consular agents, and these gentlemen endeared
themselves to us by assisting at our escape from
their island in an open boat. They did not tell
us, however, that Fonseca Bay was one of the
most treacherous stretches of water on the ad-
miralty charts ; but that was, probably, because
they were merchants and not sailors.

Amapala was the hottest place I ever visit-
ed. It did not grow warm as the day wore on,
but began briskly at sunrise by nailing the mer-
cury at fever- heat, and continued boiling and
broiling until ten at night. By one the next
morning the roof over your head and the bed-
linen beneath you had sufficiently cooled for you
to sleep, and from that on until five there was a
fair imitation of night.

There was but one cool spot in Amapala ; it

l68 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

was a point of land that the inhabitants had
rather tactlessly selected as a dumping- ground
for the refuse of the town, and which was only
visited by pigs and buzzards. This point of land
ran out into the bay, and there had once been
an attempt made to turn it into a public park, of
which nothing now remains but a statue to Mo-
razan, the Liberator of Honduras. The statue
stood on a pedestal of four broad steps, sur-
rounded by an iron railing, the gates of which
had fallen from their hinges, and lay scattered
over the piles of dust and debris under which
the park is buried. At each corner of the railing
there were beautiful macaws which had once
been painted in brilliant reds and greens and
yellows, and which we tried to carry off one
night, until we found that they also were made
of iron. We would have preferred the statue of
Morazan as a souvenir, but that we doubted its
identity. Morazan was a smooth-faced man with
a bushy head of hair, and this statue showed him
with long side- whiskers and a bald head, and in
the uniform of an English admiral. It was prob-
ably the rejected work of some English sculptor,
and had been obtained, no doubt, at a moderate
price, and as very few remember Morazan to-day
it answers its purpose excellently well. We be-
came very much attached to it, and used to burn
incense to it in the form of many Honduranian
cigars, which sell at two cents apiece.

AT CORINTO 169

When night came on, and the billiard-room
had grown so hot that the cues slipped in our
hands, and the tantalizing sight of an American
ice-cooler, which had never held ice since it left
San Francisco, had driven us out into the night,
we would group ourselves at the base of this
statue to Morazan, and throw rocks at the buz-
zards and pigs, and let the only breeze that dares
to pass over Amapala bring our temperature
down to normal. We should have plotted a revo-
lution by rights, for the scene was set for such a
purpose, and no one in the town accounted in any
other way for our climbing the broken iron rail-
ing nightly, and remaining on the steps of the
pedestal until two the next morning.

Amapala, I suppose, was used to heat, and
could sleep with the thermometer at ninety, and
did not mind the pigs or the buzzards, and if we
did plot to convert Honduras into a monarchy
and make Somerset king, no one heard us but
the English edition of Morazan smiling blandly
down upon us like a floor-walker at the Army
and Navy Stores, with his hand on his heart
and an occasional buzzard soaring like Poe's ra-
ven above his marble forehead. The moonlight
turned him into a figure of snow, and the great
palms above bent and waved and shivered un-
ceasingly, and the sea beat on the rocks at our
feet.

It was an interesting place of rendezvous, but

170 THRF.E GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

we tired of a town that grew cool only after mid-
night, and in which the fever stalked abroad by
day. So we chartered a small boat, and provi-
sioned it, and enlisted a crew of pirates, and set
sail one morning for Corinto, seventy- five miles
farther south. There was no steamer expected
at Corinto at any earlier date than at Amapala,
but in the nature of things one had to touch
there some time, and there was a legend to which
•we had listened with doubt and longing to the
effect that at Corinto there was an ice -machine,
and though we found later that the ice-machines
always broke on the day we arrived in port,
we preferred the chance of finding Fonseca Bay
in a peaceful state to yellow-fever at Amapala.
It was an exciting voyage. I would now, being
more wise, choose the yellow-fever, but we did
not know any better then. There was no deck
to the boat, and it was not wide enough for one
to lie lengthwise from side to side, and too
crowded to permit of our stretching our bodies
fore and aft. So we rolled about on top of one
another, and were far too miserable to either
apologize or swear when we bumped into a man's
ribs or sat on his head.

We started with a very fine breeze dead astern,
and the boat leaped and plunged and rolled all
night, and we were hurled against the sides and
thumped by rolling trunks, and travelling-bags,
and gun- cases, and boxes of broken apollinaris

AT CORINTO 171

bottles. The stone- breaker in a quarry would
have soothed us in comparison. And when the
sun rose fully equipped at four in the morning
the wind died away absolutely, and we rose and
sank all day on the great swell of the Pacific
Ocean. The boat was painted a bright red in-
side and out, and the sun turned this open red
bowl into an oven of heat. It made even our
white flannels burn when they touched the skin
like a shirt of horse -hair. As far as we covild
look on every side the ocean lay like a sea of
quicksilver, and the dome of the sky glittered
with heat. The red paint on the sides bubbled
and cracked, and even the native boatmen cow-
ered under the cross-seats with their elbows fold-
ed on their knees and their faces buried in their
arms ; and we had not the heart to tell them to
use the oars, even if we had known how. At
noon the chief pirate crawled over the other
bodies and rigged up the sail so that it threw a
shadow over mine, and I lay under this awning
and read Barrie's Lady Nicotine, while the type
danced up and down in waving lines like the let-
ters in a typewriter. I am sure it was only the
necessity which that book impressed upon me of
holding on to life until I could smoke the Arca-
dia mixture that kept me from dropping over-
board and being cremated in the ocean below.

We sighted the light -house of Corinto at last,
and hailed the white custom-house and the palms

172 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

and the blue cottages of the port with a feeble
cheer.

The people came down to the shore and
crowded around her bow as we beached her in
front of the custom-house, and a man asked
us anxiously in English, " What ship has been
wrecked ?" And we explained that we were not
survivors of a shipwreck, but of a possible con-
flagration, and wanted ice.

»And then, when we fell over the side bruised
and sleepy, and burning with thirst, and with
everything still dancing before our eyes, they re-
fused to give us ice until we grew cooler, and
sent out in the meanwhile to the comandancia in
search of some one who could identify us as
escaped revolutionists. They took our guns
away from us as a precaution, but they could
have had half our kingdom for all we cared, for
the wonderful legend proved true, and at last we
got the ice in large, thick glasses, with ginger
ale and lemon juice and apollinaris water trick-
ling through it, and there was frost on the sides
of the glasses, and a glimpse of still more ice
wrapped up in smoking blankets in the refrigera-
tor— ice that we had not tasted for many days
of riding in the hot sun and through steaming
swamp-lands, and which we had last seen treated
with contempt and contumely, knocked about at
the bow of a tug -boat in the North River, and
tramped upon by many muddy feet on Fifth Av-

AT COR1NTO 173

enue. None of us will ever touch ice hereafter
without handling it with the same respect and
consideration that we would show to a precious
stone.

The busybodies of Corinto who had decided
from the manner of our arrival that we had been
forced to leave Honduras for the country's good,
finally found a native who identified me as a
filibuster he had met during the last revolution
at Leon. As that was bringing it rather ne.ar
home, Griscom went after Mr. Palaccio, the Ital-
ian who serves both England and the United
States as consular agent. We showed him a rare
collection of autographs of secretaries, ambassa-
dors, and prime-ministers, and informed him that
we intended taking four state-rooms on the
steamer of the line he represented at that port.
This convinced him of the necessity of keeping
us out of jail until the boat arrived, and he satis-
fied the local authorities as to our respectability,
and that we had better clothes in our trunks.

Corinto is the best harbor on the Pacific side
of Nicaragua, but the town is not as large as the
importance of the port would suggest. It con-
sists of three blocks of two-story houses, facing
the harbor fifty feet back from the water's edge,
with a sandy street between each block of build-
ings. There are about a thousand inhabitants,
and a foreign population which varies from five
residents to a dozen transient visitors and stew-

174 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

ards on steamer days. The natives are chiefly
occupied in exporting coffee and receiving the
imported goods for the interior, and the princi-
pal amusement of the foreign colony is bathing
or playing billiards. It has a whist club of four
members. The fifth foreign resident acts as a
substitute in the event of any one of the four
players chancing to have 'another engagement,
but as there is no one with whom he could have
an engagement, the substitute is seldom called
upon. He told me he had been sitting by and
smoking and watching the others play whist for
a month now, and hoping that one of them
would have a sunstroke.

We left Corinto the next morning and took
the train to Lake Managua, where we were
to connect with a steamer which crosses the
lake to the capital. It was a beautiful ride,
and for some distance ran along the sea-shore,
where the ocean rolled up the beach in great
waves, breaking in showers of foam upon the
rocks. Then we crossed lagoons and swamps on
trestles, and passed pretty thatched villages, and
saw many beautiful women and girls selling
candy and sugar-cane at the stations. They
wore gowns that left the neck and shoulders
bare, and wrapped themselves in silk shawls of
solid colors, which they kept continually loosen-
ing and rearranging, tossing the ends coquet-
tishly from one shoulder to the other, or drawing

; W ;:

AT CORINTO 177

them closely about the figure, or like a cowl
over the head. This silk shawl is the most
characteristic part of the wardrobe of the native
women of Central America. It is as inevitable
as the mantilla of their richer sisters, and it is
generally the only bit of splendor they possess.
A group of them on a feast-day or Sunday, when
they come marching towards you with green,
purple, blue, or yellow shawls, makes a very strik-
ing picture.

These women of the pueblo in Honduras and
Nicaragua were better-looking than the women
of the lower classes of any country I have ever
visited. They were individually more beautiful,
and the proportion of beautiful women was great-
er. A woman there is accustomed from her
childhood to carry heavy burdens on her head,
and this gives to all of them an erect carriage
and a fearless uplifting of the head when they
walk or stand. They have never known a tight
dress or a tight shoe, and they move as easily
and as gracefully as an antelope. Their hair is
very rich and heavy, and they oil it and comb it
and braid it from morning to night, wearing
it parted in the middle, and drawn tightly back
over the ears, and piled upon the head in heavy
braids. Their complexion is a light brown, and
their eyes have the sad look which one sees in
the eyes of a deer or a dog, and which is not so
much the sign of any sorrow as of the lack of in-

178 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

telligencc. The women of the upper classes are
like most Spanish-American women, badly and
over dressed in a gown fashioned after some for-
gotten Parisian mode, with powder over their
faces, and with their hair frizzled and curled in
ridiculous profusion. They are a very sorry con-
trast to a woman of the people, such as you see
standing in the doorways of the mud-huts, or
advancing towards you along the trail with an
earthen jar on her shoulder, straight of limb, and
with a firm, fine lower jaw, a low, broad forehead,
and shy, sad eyes.

Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, is a most
dismal city, built on a plain of sun-dried earth,
with houses of sun-dried earth, plazas and parks
and streets of sun-dried earth, and a mantle of
dust over all. Even the stores that have been
painted in colors and hung with balconies have a
depressed, dirty, and discouraged air. The streets
are as full of ruts and furrows as a country road,
the trees in the plaza are lifeless, and their leaves
shed dust instead of dew, and the people seem to
have taken on the tone of their surroundings,
and very much more of the dust than seems ab-
solutely necessary. We were there only two
days, and felt when we left as though we had
been camping out on a baseball diamond ; and
we were sure that had we remained any longer
we should have turned into living statues of clay
when the sun shone, and of mud when it rained.

AT CORINTO l8l

There was no American minister or consul at
Managua at the time of our visit, but the English
consul took very good care of us, and acted as
our interpreter when we called upon the presi-
dent. Relations between the consul and Presi-
dent Zelaya were somewhat strained at that time,
and though we knew this we told the consul to tell
the president how much he was admired by the
American people for having taken the stand he
did against the English on the Mosquito Coast
question, and that we hoped he would see that
the British obtained no foothold near our canal.
At which the English consul would hesitate and
grin unhappily, and remark, in a hurried aside,
" I'll be hanged if I'll translate that." So we con-
tinued inventing other pleasant speeches deroga-
tory to Britons and British influence in Nicaragua
until Somerset and his consul protested vigorous-
ly, and the president saw what we were doing
and began to enjoy the consul's embarrassment
and laughed, and the consul laughed with him,
and they made up their quarrel — for the time
being, at least.

Zelaya said, among other things, that if there
were no other argument in favor of the Nicaragua
Canal than that it would enable the United States
to move her ships of war quickly from ocean to
ocean, instead of being forced as she is now to
make them take the long journey around Cape
Horn, it would be of inestimable benefit. He also

182 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

said that the only real objection that had been
made in the United States to the canal came from
those interested in the transcontinental railroads,
who saw in its completion the destruction of their
freight traffic.

He seemed to be a very able man, and more a
man of the world than Bonilla, the President of
Honduras, and much older in many ways. He
was apparently somewhat of a philosopher, and
believed, or said he did, in the survival of the fit-
test as applied to the occupation of his country.
He welcomed the gringos, he said, and if they
were better able to rule Nicaragua than her own
people, he would accept that fact as inevitable
and make way before them.

We returned to Corinto after wallowing in the
dust-bins of Managua as joyfully as though it
were a home, and we were so anxious to reach
the ocean again that we left Granada and Leon,
which are, so we are told, much more attractive
than the capital, out of our route.

Corinto was bright and green and sunny, and
the waters of the big harbor before it danced
and flashed by day and radiated with phosphor-
escent fire by night. It was distinctly a place
where it would occur to one to write up the back
pages of his diary, but it was interesting at least
in showing us the life of the exiles in these hot,
far-away seaports among a strange people.

There was but one hotel, which happened to be

PRESIDENT ZELAYA OF NICARAGUA

AT CORINTO 185

a very good one with a very bad proprietor, who,
I trust, will come some day to an untimely death
at the end of one of his own billiard-cues. The
hotel was built round a patio filled with palms
and ramparts of empty bottles from the bar, cov-
ered with dust, and bearing the name of every
brewer and wine-grower in Europe. The sleep-
ing-rooms were on the second floor, and looked
on the patio on one side and upon a wide cov-
ered veranda which faced the harbor on the
other. The five resident gringos in Corinto lived
at the hotel, and sat all day on this veranda
swinging in their hammocks and swapping six-
months-old magazines and tattered novels. Read-
ing-matter assumed an importance in Corinto it
had never attained before, and we read all the
serial stories, of which there was never more than
the fourth or sixth instalment, and the scientific
articles on the Fall of the Rupee in India, or the
Most Recent Developments in Electricity, and
delighted in the advertisements of seeds and
bicycles and baking-powders.

The top of our veranda was swept by a row
of plane-trees that grew in the sandy soil of the
beach below us, and under the shade of which
were gathered all the idle ones of the port.
There were among them thieving ships' stewards
who had been marooned from passing vessels,
ne'er-do-wells from the interior who were " comb-
ing the beach " and looking for work, but not so

l86 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

diligently that they had seen the coffee planta-
tions on their tramp down to the coast, and who
begged for money to take them back to " God's
country," or to the fever hospital at Panama.
With them were natives, sailors from the rolling
tug-boat they called a ship of war, and bare-
footed soldiers from the cartel, and longshore-
men with over-developed chests and muscles, who
toil mightily on steamer days and sleep and eat
for the ten days between as a reward.

All of these idlers gathered in the shade around
the women who sold sweet drinks and sticks of
pink-and-yellow candy. They were the public
characters of the place and the centre of all the
gossip of the town, and presided over their tables
with great dignity in freshly ironed frocks and
brilliant turbans. They were very handsome and
very clean-looking, with bare arms and shoulders,
and their hair always shone with cocoanut oil,
and was wonderfully braided and set off with
flowers stuck coquettishly over one car. The
men used to sit around them in groups on the
bags of coffee waiting for export, and on the
boxes of barbed wire, which seemed to be the
only import. And sometimes a small boy would
buy a stick of candy or command the mixture
of a drink, and the woman would fuss over her
carved gourds, and rinse and rub them and mix
queer liquors with a whirling stick of wood that
she spun between the palms of her hands. We

^T CORINTO 187

would all watch the operation with great interest,
the natives on the coffee-sacks and ourselves upon
the balcony, and regard the small boy while he
drank the concoction with envy.

The veranda had loose planks for its floor, and
gaping knot-holes through which the legs of our
chairs would sink suddenly, and which we could
use on those occasions when we wanted to drop
penknives and pencils and water on the heads of
those passing below. Our companions in idle-
ness were the German agents of the trading-
houses and young Englishmen down from the
mines to shake off a touch of fever, and two
Americans who were taking a phonograph
through Central America. Their names were
Edward Morse and Charles Brackett, and we will
always remember them as the only Americans
we met who were taking money out of Central
America and not bringing it there to lose it.

Every afternoon we all tramped a mile or two
up the beach in the hot sun for the sake of a
quarter of an hour of surf-bathing, which was de-
lightful in itself, and which was rendered espe-
cially interesting by our having to share the
surf with large man-eating sharks. When they
came, which they were sure to do ten minutes
after we had arrived, we generally gave them our
share.

The phonograph men and our party did not
believe in sharks; so we would venture out sorne

l88 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

distance, leaving the Englishmen and the Ger-
mans standing like sandpipers where the water
was hardly up to their ankles, and keeping an
anxious lookout for us and themselves. Had
the sharks attempted to attack us from the land,
they would have afforded excellent protection.
When they all yelled at once and ran back up
the beach into the bushes, we knew that they
thought we had been in long enough, and we
came out, and made as much noise as we could
while doing so. But there would be invariably
one man left behind — one man who had walked
out farther than the others, and who, owing to
the roar of the surf, could not hear our shrieks
of terror. It was exciting to watch him from
the beach diving and splashing happily by him-
self, and shaking the water out of his ears and
hair, blissfully unconscious of the deserted waste
of waters about him and of the sharp, black fin
that shot like a torpedo from wave to wave.
We would watch him as he turned to speak to
the man who the moment before had been
splashing and diving on his right, and, missing
him, turn to the other side, and then whirl about
and see us all dancing frantically up and down
in a row along the beach, beckoning and scream-
ing and waving our arms. We could observe
even at that distance his damp hair rising on his
head and his eyes starting out of their sockets
as he dug his toes into the sand and pushed

AT CORINTO 189

back the water with his arms, and worked his
head and shoulders and every muscle in his
whole body as though he were fighting his way
through a mob of men. The water seemed very
opaque at such times, and the current appeared
to have turned seaward, and the distance from
shore looked as though it were increasing at
every step.

When night came to Corinto we would sit out
on the wharf in front of the hotel and watch the
fish darting through the phosphorescent waters
and marking their passage with a trail of fire, or
we would heave a log into it and see the sparks
fly just as though we had thrown it upon a
smouldering fire. One night one of the men
was obliging enough to go into it for our benefit,
and swam under water, sweeping great circles
with his arms and legs. He was outlined as
clearly in the inky depths below as though he
wore a suit of spangles. Sometimes a shark or
some other big fish drove a shoal of little fish
towards the shore, and they would turn the whole
surface of the water into half-circles of light as
they took leap after leap for safety. Later in
the evening we would go back to the veranda
and listen to our friends the phonograph im-
presarios play duets on the banjo and guitar,
and in return for the songs of the natives they
had picked up in their wanderings we would
sing to them those popular measures which had

1QO THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

arisen into notice since they had left civiliza-
tion.

This was our life at Corinto for ten idle days,
until at last the steamer arrived, and the passen-
gers came on shore to stretch their legs and buy
souvenirs, and the ship's steward bustled about
in search of fresh vegetables, and the lighters
plied heavily between the shore and the ship's
side, piled high with odorous sacks of coffee.
And then Morse and Brackett started with their
phonograph through Costa Rica, and we con-
tinued on to Panama, leaving the five foreign
residents of Corinto to the uninterrupted enjoy-
ment of their whist, and richer and happier
through our coming in an inaccurate knowledge
of the first verse and tune of "Tommy Atkins,"
which they shouted at us defiantly as they pulled
back from the steamer's side to their quiet haven
of exile.

ON THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA

'F Ulysses in his wanderings had at-
tempted to cross the Isthmus of Pan-
ama his account of the adventure
would not have been filled with en-
gineering reports or health statistics, nor would
it have dwelt with horror on the irregularities
of the canal company. He would have treated
the isthmus in language full of imagination, and
would have delivered his tale in the form of an
allegory. He would have told how on such a
voyage his ship came upon a strip of land join-
ing two great continents and separating two
great oceans ; how he had found this isthmus
guarded by a wicked dragon that exhaled poison
with every breath, and that lay in wait, buried
in its swamps and jungles, for sailors and travel-
lers, who withered away and died as soon as
they put foot upon the shore. But that he,
warned in time by the sight of thousands of
men's bones whitening on the beach, hoisted all
sail and stood out to sea.
13

IQ4 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

It is quite as easy to believe a story like that
as to believe the truth : that for the last century
a narrow strip of swamp land has blocked the
progress of the world ; that it has joined the
peoples of two continents without permitting
them to use it as a thoroughfare ; that it has
stopped the meeting of two great oceans and
the shipping of the world, and that it has killed
with its fever half of those who came to do battle
against it. There is something almost uncanny
in the manner in which this strip of mud and
water has resisted the advance of man, as though
there really were some evil genius of the place
lurking in the rnorasses and brooding over the
waters, throwing out its poison like a serpent,
noiselessly and suddenly,' meeting the last ar-
rival at the very moment of his setting foot
upon the wharf, arrogant in health and hope and
ambition, and leaving him with clinched teeth
and raving with madness before the sun sets.
It is like the old Minotaur and his yearly tribute
of Greek maidens, with the difference that now
it is the lives of men that are sacrificed, and
men who are chosen from every nation of the
world, speaking every language, believing in
every religion ; and to-day the end of each is
marked by a wooden plank in the Catholic
Cemetery, in the Hebrew Cemetery, in the
French Cemetery, in the English Cemetery, in
the American Cemetery, for there arc acres and

ON THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 197

acres of cemeteries and thousands and thou-
sands of wooden head-stones, to which the evil
spirit of the isthmus points mockingly, and says,
" These are your failures."

The fields of Waterloo and Gettysburg saw a
sacrifice of life but little greater than these fifty
miles of swamp land between North and South
America have seen, and certainly they saw no
such inglorious defeats, without a banner flying
or a comrade cheering, or the roar of musketry
and cannon to inspire the soldiers who fell in
the unequal battle. Those who died striving to
save the Holy Land from the unspeakable Turk
were comforted by the promise of a glorious
immortality, and it must have been gratifying
in itself to have been described as a Crusader,
and to have worn the red cross upon one's
shoulder. And, in any event, a man who would
not fight for his religion or his country without
promises or pensions is hardly worthy of con-
sideration. But these young soldiers of the
transit and sailors of the dredging-scow had no
promises or sentiment to inspire them; they
were not fighting for the boundaries of their
country, but redeeming a bit.^f No Man's Land;
not doing battle for their God, but merely
digging a canal. And it must strike every one
that those of them who fell doing their duty in
the sickly yellow mist of Panama and along the
gloomy stretches of the Chagres River deserve a

198 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

better monument to their memories than the
wooden slabs in the cemeteries.

It is strange that not only nature, but man
also, should have selected the same little spot on
the earth's surface in which to show to .the
world exactly how disagreeable and unpleasant
they can make themselves when they choose.
It seems almost as though the isthmus were un-
holy ground, and that there was a curse upon it.
Some one should invent a legend to explain this,
and tell ho\v one of the priests who came over
with Columbus put the ban of the Church upon
the land for some affront by its people to the
voyagers, and so placed it under a curse for-
ever. For those whom the fever did not kill the
canal company robbed, and the ruin that came
to the peasants of France was as irredeemable
as the ravages of the fever, and the scandal that
spattered almost every public man in Paris ex-
posed rottenness and corruption as far advanced
as that in the green-coated pools along the Rio
Grande.

Ruins are always interesting, but the ruins of
Panama fill one 'only with melancholy and dis-
gust, and the relics of this gigantic swindle can
only inspire you with a contempt for yourself
and your fellow -men, and you blush at the
evidences of barefaced rascality about you.
And even the honest efforts of those who are
now in charge, and who are trying to save what

ON THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 2OI

remains, and once more to build up confidence
in the canal, reminded me of the town council-
lors of Johnstown who met in a freight depot to
decide what was to be done with the town and
those of its inhabitants that had not been swept
out of existence.

There are forty-eight miles of railroad across
the isthmus, stretching from the town of Pana-
ma on the Pacific side to that of Colon — or
Aspinwall, as it was formerly called — on the
Caribbean Sea. The canal starts a little north
of the town of Panama, in the mouth of the
Rio Grande, and runs along on one side or
the other of the railroad to the port of Colon.
The Chagres River starts about the middle of
the isthmus, and follows the route of the canal
in an easterly direction, until it empties itself
into the Caribbean Sea a little north of Colon.

The town of Panama, as you approach it from
the bay, reminds you of an Italian seaport, ow-
ing to the balconies which overhang the water
and the colored house-fronts and projecting red
roofs. As seen from the inside, the town is like
any other Spanish-American city of the second
class. There are fiacres that rattle and roll
through the clean but narrow streets behind un-
dersized ponies that always move at a gallop ;
there are cool, dark shops open to the streets, and
hundreds of negroes and Chinese coolies, and a
handsome plaza, and some very large municipal

202 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

buildings of five stories, which appeared to us,
after our experience with a dead level of one-
story huts, to tower as high as the Auditorium.
Panama, as a town, and considered by itself, and
not in connection with the canal, reminded me of
a Western county-seat after the boom had left it.
There appeared to be nothing going forward and
nothing to do. The men sat at the caf£s during
the day and talked of the past, and went to a
club at night. We saw nothing of the women,
but they seem to have a greater degree of free-
dom than their sisters in other parts of Spanish
America, owing, no doubt, to the cosmopolitan
nature of the inhabitants of Panama.

But the city, and the people in it, interest you
chiefly because of the canal ; and even the ruins
of the Spanish occupation, and the tales of buc-
caneers and of bloody battles and buried treas-
ure, cannot touch you so nearly as do the great,
pretentious building of the company and the
stories of De Lesseps' visit, and the ceremonies
and feastings and celebrations which inaugurated
the greatest failure of modern times.

The new director of the canal company put a
tug at our disposal, and sent us orders that per-
mitted us to see as much of the canal as has been
completed from the Pacific side. But before pre-
senting our orders we drove out from the city
one afternoon and began a personally conducted
inspection of the machine-shops.

ON THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 205

We had read of the pathetic spectacle present-
ed by thousands of dollars' worth of locomotive
engines and machinery lying rotting and rusting
in the swamps, and as it had interested us when
we had read of it, we were naturally even more anx-
ious to see it with our own eyes. We, however,
did not see any machinery rusting, nor any loco-
motives lying half buried in the mud. All the
locomotives that we saw were raised from the
ground on ties and protected with-a wooden shed,
and had been painted and oiled and cared for as
they would have been in the Baldwin Locomo-
tive Works. We found the same state of things
in the great machine-works, and though none of
us knew a turning-lathe from a sewing-machine,
we could at least understand that certain wheels
should make other wheels move if everything
was in working order, and so we made the wheels
go round, and punched holes in sheets of iron
with steel rods, and pierced plates, and scraped
iron bars, and climbed to shelves twenty and
thirty feet from the floor, only to find that each
bit and screw in each numbered pigeon-hole was
as sharp and covered as thick with oil as though
it had been in use that morning.

This was not as interesting as it would have
been had we seen what the other writers who
have visited the isthmus saw. And it would have
given me a better chance for descriptive writing
had I found the ruins of gigantic dredging-ma-

206 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

chines buried in the morasses, and millions of
dollars' worth of delicate machinery blistering
and rusting under the palm-trees ; but, as a rule,
it is better to describe things just as you saw
them, and not as it is the fashion to see them,
even though your way be not so picturesque.

As a matter of fact, the care the company was
taking of its machinery and its fleet of dredging-
scows and locomotives struck me as being much
more pathetic than the sight of the same instru-
ments would have been had we found them aban-
doned to the elements and the mud. For it was
like a general pipe-claying his cross-belt and pol-
ishing his buttons after his army had been routed
and killed, and he had lost everything, including
honor.

There was a little village of whitewashed huts
on the southern bank of the Rio Grande, where

HUTS OK WORKMEN EMPLOYED ON THE CANAL

\
ON THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 207

the men lived who take care of the fleet and the
machine-shop, and it was as carefully kept and as
clean as a graveyard. Before the crash came the
quarters of the men used to ring with their yells
at night, and the music of guitars and banjos
came from the open doors of caf£s and drinking-
booths, and a pistol-shot meant no more than a
momentary punctuation of the night's pleasure.
Those were great days, and there were thousands
of men where there are now a score, and a line of
light and deviltry ran from the canal's mouth for
miles back to the city, where it blazed into a
great fire of dissolute pleasure and excitement.
In those days men were making fortunes in a
night, and by ways as dark as night — by furnish-
ing machinery that could not even be put togeth-
er, by supplying blocks of granite that cost more
in freight than bars of silver, by kidnapping work-
men for the swamps, and by the simple methods
of false accounts and credits. And while some
were growing rich, others were living with the
fear of sudden death before their eyes, and drink-
ing the native rum that they might forget it, and
throwing their wages away on the roulette-tables,
and eating and drinking and making merry in the
fear that they might die on the morrow.

Mr. Wells, an American engineer, was in
charge of the company's flotilla, and waited for
us at the wharf.

" I saw you investigating our engines," he

208 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

said. "That's all right. Only tell the truth
about what you see, and we won't mind."

We stood on the bow of the tug and sped up
the length of the canal between great dredging-
machines that towered as high above us as the
bridge of an ocean liner, and that weighed ap-
parently as much as a battle-ship. The decks
of some of them were split with the heat, and
there were shutters missing from the cabin win-
dows, but the monster machinery was intact,
and the wood-work was freshly painted and
scrubbed. They reminded me of a line of old
ships of war at rest in some navy-yard. They
represent in money value, even as they are to-
day, five million francs. Beyond them on either
side stretched low green bushes, through which
the Rio Grande bent and twisted, and beyond
the bushes were high hills and the Pacific Ocean,
into which the sun set, leaving us cold and de-
pressed.

Except for the bubbling of the water under
our bow there was not a sound to disturb the
silence that hung above the narrow canal and
the green bushes that rose from a bed of water.
I thought of the entrance of the Suez Canal, as
I had seen it at Port Said and at Ismailia,
with great P. & O. steamers passing down
its length, and troop-ships showing hundreds of
white helmets above the sides, and tramp steamers
and sailing-vessels flying every flag, and com-

f

THE TOP OF A DREDGE

ON THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 211

pared it and its scenes of life and movement
with this dreary waste before us, with the idle
dredges rearing their iron girders to the sky,
the engineers' sign-posts half smothered in the
water and the mud, and with a naked fisherman
paddling noiselessly down the canal with his
eyes fixed on the water, his hollowed log canoe
the only floating vessel in what should have
been the highway of the world.

There were about eight hundred men in all
working along the whole length of the canal
while we were there, instead of the twelve thou-
sand that once made the place hum with ac-
tivity. But the work the twelve thousand ac-
complished remains, and the stranger is surprised
to find that there is so much of it and that it is
so well done. It looks to his ignorant eyes as
though only a little more energy and a greater
amount of honesty would be necessary to open
the canal to traffic ; but experts will tell him
that^one hundred million dollars will have to be
expended and seven or eight years of honest
work done before that -ditch can be dug and
France hold a Kiel celebration of her own.

But before that happens every citizen of the
United States should help to open the Nicaragua
Canal to the world under the protection and
the virtual ownership of his own country.

Our stay in Panama was shortened somewhat
on account of our having taken too great an in-

212 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

terest in the freedom of a young lawyer and
diplomat, who was arrested while we were there,
charged with being one of the leaders of the
revolution.

He was an acquaintance of Lloyd Griscom's,
who took an interest in the young rebel because
they had both been in the diplomatic service
abroad. One afternoon, while Griscom and the
lawyer were sitting together in the office of the
latter, five soldiers entered the place and ordered
the suspected revolutionist to accompany them
to the cartel. As he happened to know some-
thing of the law, he protested that they must
first show him a warrant, and while two of them
went out for the warrant and the others kept
watch in the outer office Griscom mapped out a
plan of escape. The lawyer's office hung over
the Bay of Panama, and Griscom's idea was that
he should, under the protection of the darkness,
slip down a rope from the window to a small
boat below and be rowed out to the Barracouta,
of the Pacific Mail Company's line, which was
listed to sail that same evening up the coast.
The friends of the rebel were sent for, and with
their assistance Griscom made every preparation
for the young rebel's escape, and then came to
the hotel and informed Somerset and myself of
what he had done, and asked us to aid in what
was to follow. We knew nothing of the rights
or the wrongs of the revolutionists, but we con-

STREET SCENE IN PANAMA

ON THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 215

sidered that a man who was going down a rope
into a small boat while three soldiers sat waiting
for him in an outer room was performing a
sporting act that called for our active sympathy.
So we followed Griscom to his friend's office,
and, having passed the soldiers, were ushered
into his presence and introduced to him and his
friends. He was a little man, but was not at all
alarmed, nor did he pose or exhibit any brag-
gadocio, as a man of weaker calibre might have
done under the circumstances. When we offered
to hold the rope for him, or to block up the
doors so that the soldiers might not see what
was going forward, he thanked us with such
grateful politeness that he made me feel rather
ashamed of myself ; for my interest in the matter
up to that point had not been a very serious or
a high one. Indeed, I did not even know the
gentleman's name. But as we did not know the
names of the government people against whom
he was plotting either, we felt that we could not
be accused of partiality.

The prisoner did not want his wife to know
what had happened, and so sent her word that
important legal business would detain him at
the office, and that his dinner was to be brought
to him there. The rope by which he was to
escape was smuggled past the soldiers under the
napkin which covered this dinner. It was then
seven o'clock and nearly dark, and as our rebel

2l6 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

friend feared our presence might excite suspicion,
he asked us to go away, and requested us to re-
turn in half an hour. It would then be quite
dark, and the attempt to escape could be made
with greater safety.

But the alcalde during our absence spoiled
what might have been an excellent story by
rushing in and carrying the diplomat off to jail.
When we returned we found the office locked
and guarded, and as we walked away, in doubt
as to whether he had escaped or had been ar-
rested, we found that the soldiers were following
us. As this continued throughout the evening
we went across the isthmus the next morning
to Colon, the same soldiers accompanying us on
our way.

The ship of war Atlanta was at Colon, and as
we had met her officers at Puerto Cortez, in Hon-
duras, we went on board and asked them to see
that we were not shot against church walls or
hung. They were exceedingly amused, and
promised us ample protection, and though we
did not need it on that occasion, I was impressed
with the comforting sense that comes to a trav-
eller from the States when he knows that one
of our White Squadron is rolling at anchor in
the harbor. And later, when Griscom caught
the Chagrcs fever, we had every reason to be
grateful for the presence in the harbor of the
Atlanta, as her officers, led by Dr. Bartolette and

ON THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 219

his assistant surgeon, Mr. Moore, helped him
through his sickness, visiting him daily with the
greatest kindness and good-will.

Colon did not impress us very favorably. It
is a large town of wooden houses, with a floating
population of Jamaica negroes and a few Chinese.
The houses built for the engineers of the canal
stretch out along a point at either side of a
double row of magnificent palms, which termi-
nate at the residence intended for De Lesseps.
It is now falling into decay. In front of it,
facing the sea, is a statue of Columbus protect-
ing the Republic of Colombia, represented by
an Indian girl, whp is crouching under his out-
stretched arm. This monument was presented
to the United States of Colombia by the Em-
press Eugeuie, and the statue is, in its fallen
state, with its pedestal shattered by the many
storms and time, significant of the fallen fort-
unes of that great lady herself. If Columbus
could have protected Colombia from the French
as he is in the French statue protecting her
from all the world, she would now be the rich-
est and most important of Central-American re-
publics.

Colon seems to be owned entirely by the Pan-
ama Railroad Company, a monopoly that con-
ducts its affairs with even more disregard for
the public than do other monopolies in better-
known localities. The company makes use of

220 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

the seaport as a freight-yard, and its locomo-
tives run the length of the town throughout the
entire day, blowing continually on their whistles
and ringing their bells, so that there is little
peace for the just or the unjust. We were ex-
ceedingly relieved when the doctors agreed that
Griscom was ready to put to sea again, and we
were able to turn from the scene of the great
scandal and its fever fields to the mountains of
Venezuela, and of Caracas in particular.

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA

1HOVED off by itself in a corner of
Central Park on the top of a wooded
hill, where only the people who live
in the high apartment - houses at
Eighty-first Street can see it, is an equestrian
statue. It is odd, bizarre, and inartistic, and sug-
gests in size and pose that equestrian statue to
General Jackson which mounts guard before the
White House in Washington. It shows a choc-
olate-cream soldier mastering with one hand a
rearing rocking-horse, and with the other point-
ing his sword towards an imaginary enemy.

Sometimes a "sparrow" policeman saunters
up the hill and looks at the statue with unen-
lightened eyes, and sometimes a nurse -maid
seeks its secluded site, and sits on the pedestal
below it while the children of this free republic
play unconcernedly in its shadow. On the base
of this big statue is carved the name of Simon
Bolivar, the Liberator of Venezuela.

222 THREE GFiNGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

Down on the northeastern coast of South
America, in Caracas, the capital of the United
States of Venezuela, there is a pretty little plaza,
called the Plaza Washington. It is not at all
an important plaza; it is not floored for hun-
dreds of yards with rare mosaics like the Plaza
de Bolivar, nor lit by swinging electric lights,
and the president's band never plays there. But
it has a fresh prettiness and restfulness all its
own, and the narrow gravel paths are clean and
trim, and the grass grows rich and high, and the
branches of the trees touch and interlace and
form a green roof over all, except in the very
centre, where there stands open to the blue sky
a statue of Washington, calm, dignified, benefi-
cent, and paternal. It is Washington the states-
man, not the soldier. The sun of the tropics
beats down upon his shoulders ; the palms rus-
tle and whisper pleasantly above his head. From
the barred windows of the yellow and blue and
pink houses that line the little plaza dark-eyed,
dark-skinned women look out sleepily, but un-
derstandingly, at the grave face of the North
American Bolivar; and even the policeman, with
his red blanket and Winchester carbine, compre-
hends when the gringos stop and take off their
hats and make a low bow to the father of their
country in his pleasant place of exile.

Other governments than those of the United
States of America and the United States of

STATUE OF SIMON BOLIVAR, CARACAS

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA 225

Venezuela have put up statues to their great
men in foreign capitals, but the careers of Wash-
ington and Bolivar bear so striking a resem-
blance, and the histories of the two countries
of which they are the respective fathers are so
much alike, that they might be written in parallel
columns. And so it seems especially appro-
priate that these monuments to these patriots
should stand in each of the two continents on
either side of the dividing states of Central
America.

It will offend no true Venezuelan to-day if it
be said of his country that the most interesting
man in it is a dead one, for he will allow no one
to go further than himself in his admiration for
Bolivar ; and he has done so much to keep his
memory fresh by circulating portraits of him on
every coin and stamp of the country, by placing
his statue at every corner, and by hanging his
picture in every house, that he cannot blame
the visitor if his strongest impression of Vene-
zuela is of the young man who began at thirty-
three to liberate five republics, and who con-
quered a territory more than one-third as great
as the whole of Europe.

In 1811 Venezuela declared her independence
of the mother-country of Spain, and her great
men put this declaration in writing and signed
it, and the room in which it was signed is still
kept sacred, as is the room where our declara-
15

226 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

tion was signed in Independence Hall. But the
two men who were to make these declarations
worth something more than the parchment upon
which they were written were not among the
signers. Their work was still to come, and it
was much the same kind of work, and carried
on in much the same spirit of indomitable ener-
gy under the most cruel difficulties, and with a
few undrilled troops against an army of veter-
ans. It was marked by brilliant and sudden
marches and glorious victories ; and where Wash-
ington suffered in the snows of Valley Forge,
or pushed his way through the floating ice of
the Delaware, young Bolivar marched under
fierce tropical suns, and cut his path through
jungle and swamp-lands, and over the almost
impenetrable fastnesses of the Andes.

Their difficulties were the same and their aim
was the same, but the characters of the two men
were absolutely and entirely different, for Boli-
var was reckless, impatient of advice, and even
foolhardy. What Washington was we know.

The South-American came of a distinguished
Spanish family, and had been educated as a
courtier and as a soldier in the mother-country,
though his heart remained always with his own
people, and he was among the first to take up
arms to set them free. Unless you have seen
the country through which he led his men, and
have measured the mountains he climbed with

STATUE OF WASHINGTON DECORATED WITH FLORAL WREATHS
BY THE VENEZUELANS

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA 229

his few followers, it is quite impossible to un-
derstand the immensity of the task he accom-
plished. Even to-day a fast steamer cannot
reach Callao from Panama under seven days,
and yet Bolivar made the same distance and on
foot, starting from the South Atlantic, and con-
tinuing on across the continent to the Pacific side,
and then on down the coast into Peru, living on
his way upon roots and berries, sleeping on the
ground wrapped in a blanket, riding on mule-
back or climbing the steep trail on foot, and free-
ing on his way Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador,
Bolivia, and finally Peru, the home of the Incas.
The history of this campaign is one too glori-
ous and rich in incident and color to be crowded
into a few pages, and the character of its chief
actor too varied, and his rise and fall too dra-
matic, to be dismissed, as it must be here, in a
few paragraphs. But every American who loves
a hero and who loves a lover — and Bolivar was
very much of both, and perhaps too much of the
latter — should read the life of this young man
who freed a country rich in brave men, who
made some of these who were much his senior
in years his lieutenants, and who, after risking
his life upon many battle-fields and escaping
several attempts at assassination, died at last
deserted except by a few friends, and with a
heart broken by the ingratitude of the people
he had led out of captivity.

230 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

It is difficult to find out, even in his own
country, why the Venezuelans, after heaping
Bolivar with honors and elevating him to the
place of a god, should have turned against him,
and driven him into exile at Santa Marta. Some
will tell you that he tried to make himself dicta-
tor over the countries which he had freed ; others
say that it was because he had refused to be a
dictator that the popular feeling went against
him, and that when the people in the madness
of their new-found freedom cried, "Thou hast
rid us of kings; be thou king," he showed them
their folly, and sought his old home, and died
there before the reaction came, which was to
sweep him back once more and forever into the
place of the popular hero of South America.

It was sixteen years after his death that a
hero-worshipping friend was brave enough to
commission an artist to design a statue to his
rnemory. On the neck of this statue the artist
hung the representation of a miniature in the
shape of a medallion, which had been given to
Bolivar by the family of Washington. On the
reverse was a lock of Washington's hair and the
inscription, " This portrait of the founder of
liberty in North America is presented by his
adopted son to him who has acquired equal
glory in South America."

Some one asked why the artist had stripped
from the breast of Bolivar all of the other

DECORATION OF THE STATUE OF BOLIVAR AT CARACAS, VENE-
ZUELA, DECEMBER l8, 1895, BY AMERICAN RESIDENTS

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA 233

medals and stars that had been given him by
different countries in the hour of his triumph,
and the artist answered that he had done as his
patron and the friend of Bolivar thought would
best please his hero. And ever after that it was
decreed that every bust or statue or engraving
of the Liberator should show him with this
portrait of Washington hanging by a ribbon
about his neck ; and so you will see in the
National Portrait Gallery that while the coats
of his lieutenants glitter with orders and cross-
es, Bolivar's bears this medal only. It was his
greatest pride, and he considered it his chief
glory. And the manner of its bestowal was
curiously appropriate. In 1824 General Lafay-
ette returned to this country as the guest of
the nation, and a banquet was given to him by
Congress, at which the memory of Washington
and the deeds of his French lieutenant were
honored again and again. It was while the
enthusiasm and rejoicings of this celebration
were at their height that Henry Clay rose in
his place and asked the six hundred Americans
before him to remember that while they were
enjoying the benefits of free institutions founded
by the bravery and patriotism of their fore-
fathers, their cousins and neighbors in the south-
ern continent were struggling to obtain that same
independence.

" No nation, no generous Lafayette," he cried,

234

THREE GRINOOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

"has come to their aid; alone and without help
they have sustained their glorious cause, trusting
to its justice, and with the assistance only of

their bravery, their deserts, and their Andes —
and one man, Simon Bolivar, the Washington of
South America."

And you can imagine the six hundred Ameri-
cans jumping to their feet and cheering the

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA 237

name of the young soldier, and the French
marquis eagerly asking that he might be the one
to send him some token of their sympathy and
admiration. Lafayette forwarded the portrait
of Washington to Bolivar, who valued it so
highly that the people who loved him valued
the man he worshipped ; and to-day you will see
in Caracas streets and squares and houses named
after Washington, and portraits of Washington
crossing the Delaware, and Washington on horse-
back, and Washington at Mount Vernon, hang-
ing in almost every shop and cafe in the capital.
And the next time you ride in Central Park you
might turn your bicycle, or tell the man on the
box to turn the horses, into that little curtain of
trees, and around the hill where the odd-looking
statue stands, and see if you cannot feel some
sort of sympathy and pay some tribute to this
young man who loved like a hero, and who
fought like a hero, with the fierceness of the
tropical sun above him, and whose inspiration
was the calm, grave parent of your own country.

Bolivar's country is the republic of South
America that stands nearest to New York, and
when people come to know more concerning it,
I am sure they will take to visiting it and its
capital, the " Paris of South America," in the
winter months, as they now go to southern Eu-
rope or to the Mediterranean.

There are many reasons for their doing so.

238 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

In the first place, it can be reached in less than
six days, and it is the only part of South Amer-
ica to which one can go without first crossing
the Isthmus of Panama and then taking a long
trip down the western coast, or sailing for nearly
a month along the eastern coast ; and it is a
wonderfully beautiful country, and its cities of
Caracas and Valencia are typical of the best
South -American cities. When you have seen
them you have an intelligent idea of what the
others are like ; and when you read about rev-
olutions in Rio Janeiro, or Valparaiso, or Buenos
Ayres, you will have in your mind's eye the
background for all of these dramatic uprisings,
and you will feel superior to other people who
do not know that the republic of Venezuela is
larger than France, Spain, and Portugal together,
and that the inhabitants of this great territory
are less in number than those of New York city.
La Guayra is the chief seaport of Venezuela.
It lies at the edge of a chain of great mountains,
where they come down to wet their feet in the
ocean, and Caracas, the capital, is stowed away
three thousand feet higher up behind these
mountains, and could only be bombarded in
time of war by shells that would rise like rockets
and drop on the other side of the mountains,
and so cover a distance quite nine miles away
from the vessel that fired them. Above La
Guayra, on the hill, is a little fortress which was

THE RAILROAD UP THE MOUNTAIN

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA 241

once the residence of the Spanish governor
when Venezuela was a colony of Spain. It is of
interest now chiefly because Charles Kingsley
describes it in Westward Ho ! as the fortress in
which the Rose of Devon was imprisoned. Past
this fortress, and up over the mountains to the
capital, are a mule -trail and an ancient wagon-
road and a modern railway.

It is a very remarkable railroad ; its tracks cling
to the perpendicular surface of the mountain like
the tiny tendrils of a vine on a stone-wall, and
the trains creep and crawl along the edge of its
precipices, or twist themselves into the shape of
a horseshoe magnet, so that the engineer on the
locomotive can look directly across a bottomless
chasm into the windows of the last car. The
view from this train, while it pants and puffs on
its way to the capital, is the most beautiful com-
bination of sea and plain and mountain that I
have ever seen. There are higher mountains and
more beautiful^ perhaps, but they run into a
brown prairie or into a green plain ; and there
are as beautiful views of the ocean, only you have
to see them from the level of the ocean itself, or
from a chalk-cliff with the downs behind you and
the white sand at your feet. But nowhere else
in the world have I seen such magnificent and
noble mountains running into so beautiful and
green a plain, and beyond that the great blue
stretches of the sea. When you look down from
16

242 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

the car -platform you see first, stretching three
thousand feet below you, the great green ribs of
the mountain and its valleys and waterways lead-
ing into a plain covered with thousands and thou-
sands of royal palms, set so far apart that you
can distinguish every broad leaf and the full
length of the white trunk. Among these are the
red-roofed and yellow villages, and beyond them
again the white line of breakers disappearing and
reappearing against the blue as though some one
were wiping out a chalk -line and drawing it in
again, and then the great ocean weltering in the
heat and stretching as far as the eye can see, and
touching a sky so like it in color that the two are
joined in a curtain of blue on which the ships
seem to lie flat, like painted pictures on a wall.
You pass through clouds on your way up that
leave the trees and rocks along the track damp
and shining as after a heavy dew, and at some
places you can peer through them from the steps
of the car down a straight fall of three thousand
feet. When you have climbed to the top of the
mountain, you see below you on the other side
the beautiful valley in which lies the city of Cara-
cas, cut up evenly by well-kept streets, and diversi-
fied by the towers of churches and public build-
ings and open plazas, with the white houses and
gardens of the coffee -planters lying beyond the
city at the base of the mountains.

Venezuela, after our experiences of Central

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA 245

America, was like a return to civilization after
months on the alkali plains of Texas. We found
Caracas to be a Spanish-American city of the first
class, with a suggestion of the boulevards, and
Venezuela a country that possessed a history of
her own, and an Academy of wise men and ar-
tists, and a Pantheon for her heroes. I suppose
we should have known that this was so before we
visited Venezuela ; but as we did not, we felt as
though we were discovering a new country for
ourselves. It was interesting to find statues of
men of whom none of us had ever heard, and
who were distinguished for something else than
military successes, men who had made discoveries
in science and medicine, and who had written
learned books ; to find the latest devices for
comfort of a civilized community, and with them
the records of a fierce struggle for independence,
a long period of disorganization, where the
Church had the master-hand, and then a rapid
advance in the habits and customs of enlight-
ened nations. There are the most curious com-
binations and contrasts, showing on one side a
pride of country and an eagerness to emulate
the customs of stable governments, and on the
other evidences of the Southern hot-blooded tem-
perament and dislike of restraint.

On the corner of the principal plaza stands the
cathedral, with a tower. Ten soldiers took ref-
uge in this tower four years ago, during the last

246 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

revolution, and they made so determined a fight
from that point of vantage that in order to dis-
lodge them it was found necessary to build a fire
in the tower and smoke them out with the fumes
of sulphur. These ten soldiers were the last to
make a stand within the city, and when they fell,
from the top of the tower, smothered to death,
the revolution was at an end. This incident of
warfare is of value when you contrast the thing
done with its environment, and know that next
to the cathedral -tower are confectionery -shops
such as you find on Regent Street or upper
Broadway, that electric lights surround the ca-
thedral, and that tram-cars run past it on rails
sunk below the surface of the roadway and over
a better street than any to be found in New York
city.

Even without acquaintances among the people
of the capital there are enough public show-places
in Caracas to entertain a stranger for a fortnight.
It is pleasure enough to walk the long, narrow
streets under brilliantly colored awnings, between
high one and two story houses, painted in blues
and pinks and greens, and with overhanging red-
tiled roofs and projecting iron balconies and open
iron - barred windows, through which you gain
glimpses beyond of cool interiors and beautiful
courts and gardens filled with odd-looking plants
around a splashing fountain.

The ladies of Caracas seem to spend much of

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA 249

their time sitting at these windows, and are al-
ways there in the late afternoons, when they
dress themselves and arrange their hair for the
evening, and put a little powder on their faces,
and take their places in the cushioned window-
seats as though they were in their box at the op-
era. And though they are within a few inches
of the passers-by on the pavement, they can look
through them and past them, and are as oblivious
of their presence as though they were invisible.
In the streets are strings of mules carrying bags
of coffee or buried beneath bales of fodder, and
jostled by open fiacres, with magnificent coach-
men on the box-seat in top-boots and gold
trimmings to their hats and coats, and many sol-
diers, on foot and mounted, hurrying along at a
quick step in companies, or strolling leisurely
alone. They wear blue uniforms with scarlet
trousers and facings, and the president's body-
guard are in white duck and high black boots,
and are mounted on magnificent horses.

There are three great buildings in Caracas —
the Federal Palace, the Opera-house, and the Pan-
theon, which was formerly a church, and which
has been changed into a receiving-vault and a me-
morial for the great men of the country. Here,
after three journeys, the bones of Bolivar now
rest. The most interesting of these buildings is
the Federal Palace. It is formed around a great
square filled with flowers and fountains, and lit

250 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

with swinging electric lights. It is the handsom-
est building in Caracas, and within its four sides
are the chambers of the upper and lower branch-
es of the legislature, the offices of the different
departments of state, and the reception-hall of
the president, in which is the National Portrait
Gallery. The palace is light and unsubstantial-
looking, like a canvas palace in a theatre, and
suggests the casino at a French watering-place.
It is painted in imitation of stone, and the stat-
ues are either of plaster- of- paris or of wood,
painted white to represent marble. But the the-
atrical effect is in keeping with the colored walls
and open fronts of the other buildings of the city,
and is not out of place in this city of such dra-
matic incidents.

The portraits in the state-room of the palace
immortalize the features of fierce-looking, dark-
faced generals, with old-fashioned high-standing
collars of gold-braid, and green uniforms. Strange
and unfamiliar names are printed beneath these
portraits, and appear again painted in gold let-
ters on a roll of honor which hangs from the ceil-
ing, and which faces a list of the famous battles
for independence. High on this roll of honor
are the names " General O'Leary " and " Colo-
nel Fergurson," and among the portraits are the
faces of two blue-eyed, red-haired young men,
with fair skin and broad chests and shoulders,
one wearing the close - clipped whiskers of the

PRESIDENT CRESPO, OF VENEZUELA

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA 253

last of the Georges, and the other the long Dun-
dreary whiskers of the Crimean wars. Whether
the Irish general and the English colonel gave
their swords for the sake of the cause of inde-
pendence or fought for the love of fighting, I do

LEGISLATIVE BUILDING, CARACAS

not know, but they won the love of the Spanish-
Americans by the service they rendered, no mat-
ter what their motives may have been for serving.
Many people tell you proudly that they are de-
scended from " O'Leari," and the names of the
two foreigners are as conspicuous on pedestals
and tablets of honor as are their smiling blue

254 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

eyes and red cheeks among the thin - visaged,
dark-skinned faces of their brothers-in-arms.
. At one end of the room is an immense paint-
ing of a battle, and the other is blocked by as
large a picture showing Bolivar dictating to mem-
bers of Congress, who have apparently ridden out
into the field to meet him, and are holding an
impromptu session beneath the palm leaves of
an Indian hut. The dome of the chamber,
which latter is two hundred feet in length, is
covered with an immense panorama, excellently
well done, showing the last of the battles of the
Venezuelans against the Spaniards, in which the
figures are life-size and the action most spirited,
and the effect of color distinctly decorative.
These paintings in the National Gallery would
lead you to suppose that there was nothing but
battles in the history of Venezuela, and that her
great men were all soldiers, but the talent of the
artists who have painted these scenes and the
actors in them corrects the idea. Among these
artists are Arturo Michelena, who has exhibited
at the World's Fair, and frequently at the French
Salon, from which institution he has received a
prize, M. Tovar y Tovar, A. Herrea Toro, and
Cristobal Rojas.

It was that "Illustrious American, Guzman
Blanco," one of the numerous presidents of Ven-
ezuela, and probably the best known, who was
responsible for most of the public buildings of

' A

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA 257

the capital. These were originally either con-
vents or monasteries, which he converted, after
his war with the Church, into the Federal Pal-
ace, the Opera-house, and a university. Each of
these structures covers so much valuable ground,
and is situated so advantageously in the very
heart of the city, that one gets a very good idea
of how powerful the Church element must have
been before Guzman overthrew it.

He was a peculiar man, apparently, and pos-
sessed of much force and of a progressive spirit,
combined with an overmastering vanity. The
city was at its gayest under his regime, and he
encouraged the arts and sciences by creating va-
rious bodies of learned men, by furnishing the
nucleus for a national museum, by subsidizing
the Opera-house, and by granting concessions
to foreign companies which were of quite too
generous a nature to hold good, and which now
greatly encumber and embarrass his successors.
But while he was president, and before he
went to live in luxurious exile on the Avenue
Kleber, which seems to be the resting-place of
all South American presidents, he did much to
make the country prosperous and its capital at-
tractive, and he was determined that the people
should know that he was the individual who ac-
complished these things. With this object he
had fifteen statues erected to himself in different
parts of the city, and more tablets than one can

258 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

count. Each statue bore an inscription telling
that it was erected to that " Illustrious Ameri-
can, Guzman Blanco," and every new bridge and
road and public building bore a label to say that
it was Guzman Blanco who was responsible for
its existence. The idea of a man erecting stat-
ues to himself struck the South-American mind
as extremely humorous, and one night all the
statues were sawed off at the ankles, and to-day
there is not one to be seen, and only raw places
in the walls to show where the memorial tablets
hung. But you cannot wipe out history by pull-
ing down columns or effacing inscriptions, and
Guzman Blanco undoubtedly did do much for
his country, even though at the same time he
was doing a great deal for Guzman Blanco.

Guzman was followed in rapid succession by
three or four other presidents and dictators, who
filled their pockets with millions and then fled
the country, only waiting until their money was
first safely out of it. Then General Crespo, who
had started his revolution with seven men, final-
ly overthrew the government's forces, and was
elected president, and has remained in office
ever since. To set forth with seven followers to
make yourself president of a country as large as
France, Portugal, and Spain together requires a
great deal of confidence and courage. General
Crespo is a fighter, and possesses both. It was
either he or one of his generals — the story is told

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA 261

of both — who, when he wanted arms for his
cowboys, bade them take off their shirts and
grease their bodies and rush through the camp of
the enemy in search of them. He told them to
hold their left hands out as they ran, and when-
ever their fingers slipped on a greased body they
were to pass it by, but when they touched a man
wearing a shirt they were to cut him down with
their machetes. In this fashion three hundred
of his plainsmen routed two thousand of the reg-
ular troops, and captured all of their rifles and
ammunition. The idea that when you want
arms the enemy is the best person from whom
to take them is excellent logic, and that charge
of the half -naked men, armed only with their
knives, through the sleeping camp is Homeric
in its magnificence.

Crespo is more at home when fighting in the
field than in the council-chamber of the Yellow
House, which is the White House of the repub-
lic ; but that may be because he prefers fight-
ing to governing, and a man generally does best
what he likes best to do. He is as simple in his
habits to-day as when he was on the march with
his seven revolutionists, and goes to bed at eight
in the evening, and is deep in public business by
four the next morning; many an unhappy min-
ister has been called to an audience at sunrise.
The president neither smokes nor drinks ; he is
grave and dignified, with that dignity which enor-

262 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

mous size gives, and his greatest pleasure is to
take a holiday and visit his ranch, where he watch-
es the round-up of his cattle and gallops over his
thousands of acres. He is the idol of the cow-
boys, and has a body-guard composed of some of
the men of this class. I suppose they are very
much like our own cowboys, but the citizens of
the capital look upon them as the Parisians re-
garded Napoleon's Mamelukes, and tell you in
perfect sincerity that when they charge at night
their eyes flash fire in a truly terrifying manner.
I saw the president but once, and then but
for a few moments. He was at the Yellow
House and holding a public reception, to which
every one was admitted with a freedom that be-
tokened absolute democracy. When my turn
came he talked awhile through Colonel Bird,
our consul, but there was no chance for me to
gain any idea of him except that he was very
polite, as are all Venezuelans, and very large.
They tell a story of him which illustrates his
character. He was riding past the university
when a group of students hooted and jeered at
him, not because of his politics, but because of
his origin. A policeman standing by, aroused to
indignation by this insult to the president, fired
his revolver into the crowd. Crespo at once
ordered the man's arrest for shooting at a citi-
zen with no sufficient provocation, and rode on
his way without even giving a glance at his tor-

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA 265

mentors. The incident seemed to show that he
was too big a man to allow the law to be broken
even in his own defence, or, at least, big enough
not to mind the taunts of ill-bred children.

The boys of the university are taken very se-
riously by the people of Caracas, as are all boys
in that country, where a child is listened to, if
he be a male child, with as much grave polite-
ness as though it were a veteran who was speak-
ing. The effect is not good, and the boys, espe-
cially of the university, grow to believe that
they are very important factors in the affairs of
the state, when, as a matter of fact, they are
only the cat's-paws of clever politicians, who use
them whenever they want a demonstration and do
not wish to appear in it themselves. So these
boys are sent forth shouting into the streets, and
half the people cheer them on, and the children
themselves think they are patriots or liberators,
or something equally important.

I obtained a rather low opinion of them
because they stoned an unfortunate American
photographer who was taking pictures in the
quadrangles, and because I was so far interested
in them as to get a friend of mine to translate
for me the sentences and verses they had writ-
ten over the walls of their college. The verses
were of a political character, but so indecent that
the interpreter was much embarrassed ; the sin-
gle^ sentences were attacks, anonymous, of course,

266 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

on fellow-students. As the students of the Uni-
versity of Venezuela step directly from college
life into public life, their training is of some in-
terest and importance. And I am sure that the
Venezuelan fathers would do much better by
their sons if they would cease to speak of the
university in awe-stricken tones as " the hot-
bed of liberty," but would rather take away
the boys' revolvers and teach them football, and
thrash them soundly whenever they caught them
soiling the walls of their alma mater with nasty
verses.

There are some beautiful drives around Cara-
cas, out in the country among the coffee planta-
tions, and one to a public garden that overlooks
the city, upon which President Crespo has spent
much thought and money. But the most beau-
tiful feature of Caracas, and one that no person
who has visited that place will ever forget, is the
range of mountains above it, which no president
can improve. They are smooth and bare of
trees and of a light -green color, except in the
waterways, where there are lines of darker green,
and the clouds change their aspect continually,
covering them with shadows or floating over
them from valley to valley, and hovering above
a high peak like the white smoke of a volcano.

I do not know of a place that will so well re-
pay a visit as Caracas, or a country that is so
well worth exploring as Venezuela. To a sports-

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA 269

man it is a paradise. You can shoot deer
within six miles of the Opera-house, and in six
hours beyond Macuto you can kill panther, and
as many wild boars as you wish. No country
in South America is richer in such natural prod-
ucts as cocoa, coffee, and sugar-cane. And in
the interior there is a vast undiscovered and
untouched territory waiting for the mining en-
gineer, the professional hunter, and the breeder
of cattle.

The government of Venezuela at the time of
our visit to Caracas was greatly troubled on ac-
count of her boundary dispute with Great Britain,
and her own somewhat hasty action in sending
three foreign ministers out of the country for
daring to criticise her tardiness in paying foreign
debts and her neglect in not holding to the terms
of concessions. These difficulties, the latter of
which were entirely of her own making, were in-
teresting to us as Americans, because the talk
on all sides showed that in the event of a serious
trouble with any foreign power Venezuela looked
confidently to the United States for aid. Now,
since President Cleveland's so-called " war " mes-
sage has been written, she is naturally even more
liable to go much further than she would dare go
if she did not think the United States was back
of her. Her belief in the sympathy of our govern-
ment is also based on many friendly acts in the
past : on the facts that General Miranda, the sol-

27° THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

dier who preceded Bolivar, and who was a friend
of Hamilton, Fox, and Lafayette, first learned
to hope for the independence of South America
during the battle for independence in our own
country ; that when the revolution began, in 1810,
it was from the United States that Venezuela
received her first war material ; that two years
later, when the earthquake of 1812 destroyed
twenty thousand people, the United States Con-
gress sent many ship-loads of flour to the sur-
vivors of the disaster; and that as late as 1888
our Congress again showed its good feeling by
authorizing the secretary of the navy to return
to Venezuela on a ship of war the body of Gen-
eral Paez, who died in exile in New York city,
and by appointing a committee of congressmen
and senators to represent the government at his
public funeral.

All of these expressions of good-will in the
past count for something as signs that the Unit-
ed States may be relied upon in the future, but
it is a question whether she will be willing to go
as far as Venezuela expects her to go. Ven-
ezuela's hope of aid, and her conviction, which
is shared by all the Central American republics,
that the United States is going to help her and
them in the hour of need, is based upon what
they believe to be the Monroe Doctrine. The
Monroe Doctrine as we understand it is a very
different thing from the Monroe Doctrine as they

c a

CL «!

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA 273

understand it; and while their reading of it is
not so important as long as we know what it
means and enforce it, there is danger nevertheless
in their way of looking at it, for, according to
their point of view, the Monroe Doctrine is ex-
pected to cover a multitude of their sins. Pres-
ident Monroe said that we should "consider any
attempt on the part of foreign powers to extend
their system to any portion of this hemisphere as
dangerous to our peace and safety, and that we
could not view any interposition for the purpose
of oppressing those governments that had de-
clared their independence, or controlling in any
other manner their destiny, by any European pow-
er, in any other light than as a manifestation of
an unfriendly disposition to the United States."

He did not say that if a Central American re-
public banished a British consul, or if Venezuela
told the foreign ministers to leave the country
on the next steamer, that the United States
would back them up with force of arms.

Admiral Meade's squadron touched at La
Guayra while we were at the capital, the squad-
ron visiting the port at that time in obedience to
the schedule already laid out for it in Washing-
ton some months previous, just as a theatrical
company plays a week's stand at the time and at
the place arranged for it in advance by its agent,
but the Venezuelans did not consider this, and
believed that the squadron had been sent there

18

274

THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

to intimidate the British and to frighten the
French and German men-of-war which were then
expected in port to convey their dismissed min-
isters back to their own countries. One of the
most intelligent men that I met in Caracas, and

VENEZUELAN STATION ON THE CUYUNI RIVER
The Barracks and House in which the English Police were confined

one closely connected with the Foreign Office,
told me he had been to La Guayra to see our
squadron, and that the admiral had placed his
ships of war in the harbor in such a position
that at a word he could blow the French and

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA

275

German boats out of the water. I suggested to
one Venezuelan that there were other ways of
dismissing foreign ministers than that of telling
them to pack up and get out of the country in a

ENGLISH STATION ON THE CUYUNI RIVER

Inspector Barnes, Chief of the English Police who were captured by the Ven-
ezuelan troops, is seated on the steps

week, and that I did not think the Monroe Doc-
trine meant that South American republics could
affront foreign nations with impunity. He an-
swered me by saying that the United States had
aided Mexico when Maximilian tried to found an

276 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

empire in that country, and he could not see that
the cases were not exactly similar.

They will, however, probably understand better
what the Monroe Doctrine really is before their
boundary dispute with Great Britain is settled,
and Great Britain will probably know more
about it also, for it is possible that there never
was a case when the United States needed to
watch her English cousins more closely than in
this international dispute over the boundary-line
between Venezuela and British Guiana. If Eng-
land succeeds it means a loss to Venezuela of a
territory as large as the State of New York, and
of gold deposits which are believed to be the
richest in South America, and, what is more im-
portant, it means the entire control by the Eng-
lish of the mouth and four hundred miles of the
Orinoco River. The question is one of histori-
cal records and maps, and nothing else. Great
Britain fell heir to the rights formerly possessed
by Holland. Venezuela obtained by conquest
the lands formerly owned by Spain. The prob-
lem to be solved is to find what were the posses-
sions of Holland and Spain, and so settle what is
to-day the territory of England and Venezuela.
Year after year Great Britain has pushed her
way westward, until she has advanced her claims
over a territory of forty thousand square miles,
and has included Barima Point at the entrance
to the Orinoco. She has refused positively,

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA 277

DR. PEDRO EZEQUIEL ROJAS
Minister of Foreign Affairs

through Lord Salisbury, to recede or to arbitrate,
and it is impossible for any one at this writing to
foretell what the outcome will be. If the Mon-
roe Doctrine does not apply in this case, it has
never meant anything in the past, and will not
mean much in the future.

278 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

Personally, although the original Monroe Doc-
trine distinctly designates " this hemisphere," and
not merely this continent, I cannot think the

MAI' KXI'I.AINING VENEZUELAN BOUNDARY DISPUTE

principle of this doctrine should be applied in
this instance. For if it does apply, it could be
extended to other disputes much farther south,

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA 281

and we might have every republic in South Amer-
ica calling on us for aid in matters which could
in no possible way affect either the honor or the
prosperity of our country.

In any event the Monroe Doctrine is distinctly
a selfish one, so far, at least, as all rules for self-
preservation must be selfish, and I should prefer
to think that we are interfering in behalf of
Venezuela, not because we ourselves are threat-
ened by the encroachments of Great Britain, but
because we cannot stand by and see a weak
power put upon by one of the greatest. It may
be true, as the foreign powers have pointed out,
that the aggressions of Great Britain are none of
our business, but as we have made them our
business, it concerns no one except Great Britain
and ourselves, and now having failed to avoid
the entrance to a quarrel, and being in, we must
bear ourselves so that the enemy may beware
of us, and see that we issue forth again with
honor, and without having stooped to the sin
of war.

Caracas was the last city we visited on our
tour, and perhaps it is just as well that this was
so, for had we gone there in the first place we
might have been in Caracas still. It is easy to
understand why it is attractive. While you
were slipping on icy pavements and drinking in
pneumonia and the grippe, and while the air was
filled with flying particles of ice and snow, and

282 THREE GRINGOS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

the fog-hound tugs on the East River were
shrieking and screeching to each other all
through the night, we were sitting out-of-doors
in the Plaza de Bolivar, looking up at the big
statue on its black marble pedestal, under the
shade of green palms and in the moonlight, with
a band of fifty pieces playing Spanish music,
and hundreds of officers in gold uniforms, and
pretty women with no covering to their heads
but a lace mantilla, circling past in an endless
chain of color and laughter and movement.
Back of us beyond the trees the cafes sent out
through their open fronts the noise of tinkling
glasses and the click of the billiard-balls and a
flood of colored light, and beyond us on the
other side rose the towers and broad facade of
the cathedral, white and ghostly in the moon-
light, and with a single light swinging in the
darkness through the open door.

In the opinion of three foreigners, Caracas
deserves her title of the Paris of South America;
and there was only one other title that appealed
to us more as we saw the shores of La Guayra
sink into the ocean behind us and her cloud-
wrapped mountains disappear, and that.it is not
necessary to explain, was " the Paris of North
America," which stretches from Bowling Green
to High Bridge.

THE END

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